Time to Recount

We are approaching what is being called the 5th anniversary of the Iraq War, and my attention has been called to that calling of it. The attention calling was done by fellow editor Artis "Not Just The Spoonman" [no last name.] Every time the subject of the Iraq War comes up in the little editorial committee meetings we have, Artis reminds us that "The Iraq War" has been going on without letup at least since the United States invaded Iraq on January 17, 1991, and therefore the anniversary we should have recognized was not the 5th but the 17th Anniversary, two months ago.

It occurred to me just last night, as I was sobering, that this is a case of "reckoning." I believe the word "reckoning" is not used often enough, and this instance demonstrates the need. Whenever someone reckons something, it would help a great deal if he/she would announce it by saying, "I reckon that... ", or, "The way I reckon it is... ", or, "By my reckoning... ", so we would all be reminded it wasn't a date or a number or an age we just heard, but a reckoning of one.

Reckoning can be loads of fun. For example, you can reckon that the official start of the War on Osama bin Laden began the day the Saudis told him they didn't love him anymore. That happened exactly when the Saudis decided to accept non-Muslim assistance in defending against the threat of Iraqi invasion (after Iraq invaded Kuwait, remember?) in direct opposition to bin Laden's idea to kick Iraqi butt with an all-Muslim army. (See? There WAS a connection between bin Laden and Iraq, before 2003!)


I could reckon that the Iraq War began at the precise beginning of history. The first written words, I reckon, were written on a clay tablet and inventoried bricks thrown by people of Sumerian city-state Eridu at people of upstart Sumerian city-state Bad-tibira. Since then there has always been an Iraq War, it's only been a question of whose war it was. For instance, for a time the Mongols owned the Iraq War. Later, the Ottomans owned it for almost 4 centuries. Then the British owned it for awhile. In 1977 even the Israelis owned a piece of it. Persians have owned it off and on, since King Cyrus. And since 1990, at the urging of Margaret Thatcher, the United States has been principal proprietor.

[Above Right: A crude facsimile of a Sumerian tablet bemoaning the fact that war only benefits brick-makers. Below: The terrible consequences of uncontrolled brick-proliferation.]

Important: Never call your reckonings calculations. If you call them calculations, people will think you're doing math. They will then groan and shun you. Likewise, never admit to counting anything. Always say you're "re-counting" it. That way it sounds like you're telling a story, which is a warm fuzzy human thing to do, instead of adding up numbers, which is a cold metallic alien thing to do, because we all personally know aliens who add all the time.

Incidentally, the word "reckon" originated with Old English "gerecenian" meaning "recount' as in "relate" or "tell a story." So etymology backs me up on this front.

[Left: What a difference an extra "E" makes!]

Which brings me around to the point I want to make. It is war, not the act of counting, that is the exact opposite of recounting and relating. War is organized confusion. War negates story telling. War kills stories. Therefore war kills reckoning.

Again, etymology is on my side. Of course, just as Eskimos have no one word for "snow", and Bedouins have no one word for "sand" (I'm making this up), so the ancient Germanic peoples didn't have a word for war per se. But one word they used, which was the word that comes down to us as "war", meant "to confuse." They were very cognizant of the fact that wearing a bear suit and a helmet with horns and running through a village shrieking and hacking at people with axes is perplexing, even disorienting, behavior.

Conversely, if you want to fight war you have to do it by taking back reckoning and recounting and story telling.

Let Them Eat Editors

I've avoided talking about the flap over Capehart. I thought I had nothing new to add to the topic.

I was thinking this week I would instead talk about brain-eating amoeba. There are few concerns I have that are more pressing to me than my concern that brain-eating amoeba not invade my nostrils and eat my brain, starting with my olfactory nerve.

Ordinarily what I write here at most mildly amuses a few people for four or five minutes and then gets forgotten and ignored. For example, if I say the Iraq War is illegal, unjust, and immoral, no one notices. I could get more action out of people if I reproduced a page from Silas Marner than if I told you all what causes homelessness and the simple steps that would end it. But I am sure if I told you how to avoid having your brains eaten by mutant brain-eating amoeba from Australia, you would listen up.

[Above right: Some brain-eaters save the brains for dessert.]

But evidently I was wrong to think that I had nothing new to say about Capehart. Last week the P-I ran an editorial in which they wrote, "We did have some concerns, however, about access to shops and transportation. For example, the nearest bus stop we could find was close to a mile away and basic drugstore supplies required a trip of more than two miles." Members of the city council said basically the same thing, that the housing was inappropriate for housing the homeless, so the plan to demolish it should therefore go forward.

I have two things to say about the inappropriateness of that "therefore."

First of all, homeless activists were never saying that the Capehart housing should be used for housing people who are currently homeless or at immediate risk of it. What we were saying was that the loss of middle class housing, in the current market, would force people who could have afforded it, and who had their own transportation, to compete for less expensive housing that could have gone to people with lower incomes, and that a loss of 66 units of housing at the lower middle class range, such as at Capehart, would ultimately either subtract 66 units from very low income housing, or those with cars would move away from Seattle altogether, and you could kiss their tax dollars goodbye.

If you really think that demolishing middle class housing doesn't hurt the homeless, try this thought experiment: Get rid of all of it. Bulldoze all the single family dwellings in all the nearly 100 neighborhoods of Seattle. Now picture where those people are all going to live if they are to stay in Seattle. When you finally see how that would put a few hundred thousand more people on the street who weren't there before, next visualize what would happen if instead of sticking around all the middle class people whose homes were bulldozed moved to Phoenix. Answer: Phoenix is the new Seattle, and Seattle is the new New Orleans.

OK, so that wasn't anything that hasn't already been said. Other homeless activists have said the same thing essentially, minus the thought experiment. [Above left: Our hero, Mr. Thought Experiment himself.]

I am now going to astonish you by saying something utterly original about the Capehart housing. Something that no one else has said and that even the brilliant editors of the intelligent Seattle Post-Intelligencer were incapable of thinking of.

Yes. The nearest bus stop to Capehart is almost a mile away. But: Metro has bus stop signs to spare!

You have to be utterly brain dead already not to be able to think that if people lacking cars and legs were living in Capehart that Metro could not be induced to extend Route 33 that far.

Have all of you forgotten that bus companies are run by human beings and do the bidding of human beings?

This country has lost its imagination and its humanity with it.

We can save ourselves from the brain-eating amoebas. Feed them P-I editorialists, and they'll all die of starvation.

[Above: In case you wondered why investors aren't much interested in a property bordering a big beautiful park.]

Muddy Waters

This won't be a fun column. Jesse Macbeth has got my panties in a knot this week.


[Above: Not that Macbeth...]

I just lied. I don't wear panties. But, if I did, they'd be in a knot. If I did, they'd be knotted ALL THE TIME.

[Right: ... this one.]

Jesse Macbeth's lie is bigger. Jesse claimed to be a veteran of the current Iraq War. He appeared in videos and wrote stories online claiming that he'd witnessed and participated in atrocities there. His stories were picked up by various organizations opposed to the war and they circulated them further, believing them to be true.

How aggravating is Jesse Macbeth's lie? Let's add it up.

One way that Jesse's lie is aggravating (as in "aggravated assault") is that the anti-war movement has been discredited by accepting his claims.

Good intentions don't justify mass killings. We don't need to catch our military in deliberate malicious acts of murder to know that their presence in Iraq has given rise to needless carnage. But it is human nature to want to simplify a moral picture by finding clear villains.

The villains aren't individual soldiers pulling triggers. The villains are the politicians who put them there knowing that war is sloppy and always kills more civilians than anybody else. The villains are the super-majority of the American people who went along with the patent lies, which were far more obvious than Jesse's, and allowed the politicians to get away with starting this war, claiming the people's support. The guilt belongs to a couple hundred million cowards, each of whom only needs to bear a tiny bit of guilt to add up to one monstrous wad of shared guilt.

All of that is meaningless to a people who are so utterly ignorant that they STILL think 15 Saudi nationals, two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Lebanese, and one Egyptian, constitutes 19 Iraqis. How do you explain to people that crushingly stupid that discovering Jesse's lie shouldn't deter the anti-war movement?

I'm reminded of events in connection with the '84-'85 Ethiopian famine. Con artists toured America posing as Ethiopians, complete with fake African accents, pretending to be personal witnesses to the suffering who had survived, and who were now in America to raise funds to help their less fortunate brethren. Instead, they raised funds to help themselves. Irrespectively, the famine went on, and roughly a million Ethiopians died.

Irrespectively of Macbeth, the Iraq War continues to be unjust.

Jesse's lie also adds aggravation to the fake vet phenomena. The VA knows there are thousands of American vets who are homeless. But every time someone turns out to be scamming the system, falsely claiming to be a vet, it discredits the thousands more who aren't faking it.

If fewer than 1 out of a hundred of the people claiming to be homeless vets turned out to be lying, that would be enough to convince almost every American that they all are lying, because almost every American is too lazy to learn the difference between 1 and 100, or between 1,000 and 100,000.

[Below left: Fictional representation of a simple moral picture.]

Jesse Macbeth has personally aggravated me. He claims to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe he does. Just because he hasn't seen combat doesn't mean he can't have PTSD. I know this personally, because I have PTSD and I haven't seen combat. Only, I prefer not to call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I prefer to call it Post Traumatic Stress You Could Have Seen Coming, If You'd Been There And Experienced The Trauma Yourself.

When I have to tell people I have PTSYCHSC, IYBTAETTY, the question always comes back, "Oh, so you're a vet then." I'd love to be able to simplify the moral picture, and say yes, if it were true. It sucks having to say no, I'm not a vet, but I've got a story of repeated incestuous rape and vicious beatings that will put your lunch off.

Now, thanks to Jesse, I can expect the question to be, "Oh, so you're pretending to be a vet, then." Thanks loads, Jesse.

Hope Springs Eternal

I haven't said much about the Iraq War lately. I hate repeating myself and you can't not when you're talking about the repetitive.

But, holy cow, look what happened this morning. First, I beat my head on this keyboard, to bang a column out. Nothing came out of my head as usual (the head-banging trick almost never works) so I did what I always do next. I checked CNN.com, to see if anything had happened overnight. And there was the story, just 39 minutes old, "Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq."

Just the day before, Blackwater contractors had been blamed for killing 8 civilians and wounding 14 in what was seen by many Iraqis as a scatter-shot response to small arms fire on a State Department motorcade.

You could say, "Insurgents shot at our State Department officials, and the Blackwater people were contracted to protect them, so what's the problem? When the insurgents stop shooting at us, Blackwater can stop shooting back." You could say that if you missed the fundamental issue involved, namely that whereas American military personnel are accountable for their actions in Iraq, to the military and ultimately to the American people, individual contractors are not. All we can do is cancel an entire contract, and that won't happen because the security companies have too many friends in the Bush Administration. Worse, our government has not permitted their puppet government in Iraq to hold military contractors to Iraqi justice. So without any investigation of the shooting having begun, everybody in Iraq had to know that the contractors involved would never pay a price, even if they had knowingly mowed down unarmed citizens in a deliberate massacre. It wouldn't matter.

Since I knew the puppet government in Iraq couldn't try these guys, it never occurred to me that they might get away with booting them out of the country altogether. It will be interesting to see if the order sticks.

I don't know about the rest of you, but this news gives me hope. I want to relish that hope. I want to savor every drop of it. Therefore I will indulge in fantasies, dreaming of the great news to come that may have just been heralded.

It might be that this is the first of many such bannings. Blackwater could be banned from Afghanistan. Then, countries where Blackwater isn't working now could ban Blackwater from working there in the future. Then, countries where Blackwater might never work anyway might ban Blackwater from passage through them. The result could be that Blackwater could be stuck operating entirely in the United States.

That done, the American people might wake up and come seriously face to face with the reality that the only remaining reason for Blackwater's continued existence is to wait in the wings until the scheduled roundup of undesirable Americans and facilitate their shuttling off to the concentration camps. And having witnessed the banning of Blackwater in the entire rest of the world, they might get the cajones to do it themselves, right here in the freedom-loving U.S. of A.

What's that? It can't happen? Americans won't get their rocks until the day comes they can tell Iraq from Afghanistan on a map? Hey, don't rain on my dream.

I'm not done. If the Iraqis, who don't even have a real government, can tell Blackwater to shove off, anything is possible. Americans could see straight to try the board and management for treason. They could elect a really good president.

The emerging testes could even affect us here in Seattle. Seattleites might realize they've been irresponsible to allow the MID Yellowjackets, unaccountable hired vigilantes, to force poor people to conform to the selfish greedy whims of the megacorporations that control the Downtown Seattle Association.

One more dream: Instead of peeing themselves every time they're asked for a quarter, and trying to put a stop to the practice, Seattleites could get the balls to just say no to panhandlers and keep walking.

Everyone Thinks YOU'RE Rude

The headline in the Times last Saturday said, “Land of the rude: Poll finds Americans behaving badly,” so I thought I was going to read about Americans telling pollsters they could take their poll and “shove it,” or inquiring about the availability of the pollsters’ sisters, or insinuating that the pollsters had canine ancestry.

Then, as I continued reading, I found out that America itself had been asked how rude it is in the poll and had answered “very.” That is, we are supposed to take America’s word for how rude it is. It turns out 70% of us think that everybody else lacks manners. My first reaction is, this is the America that can’t find Iraq on the map, and doesn’t think it needs to, but considers itself competent enough to decide whether Iraq deserves to be invaded or not. We’re asking this country to critique itself?

“Now, now,” I tell myself, “calm down; maybe some good will come from it. Maybe everybody will have arrived at some great new collective insight, like when we all agreed as a nation that Jar Jar Binks deserved a premature death.”

But it was not to be. Reading further I discovered that the rudeness people were talking about had little to do with Star Wars. The big concern was men not opening doors for women, members of some women’s lacrosse team wearing flip-flops in the White House, and crude behavior on TV shows. “It’s not like the old show, Father Knows Best,” says some overwrought couch potato who can’t distinguish TV from reality.

And who gets the blame? Me! That’s who! I’m a nasty baby boomer and it was I and my other nasty boomer co-conspirators who ruined this country. We dragged “Father Knows Best” into the dirt, exposing its cast as the alcoholics, wife-beaters, and heroin addicts they were. We raised all the rest of you to knock down little old ladies and use them as doorstops and paperweights. We made George Lucas create Jar Jar for us, precisely to torture the rest of you. We had all the sex and smoked all the cigarettes and ate all the carbohydrates, so now they’re all used up, and you. can’t. have. any.

That’s right. We baby boomers are responsible for turning this great country into a nation of rude, disgusting, flip-flop wearers. Before we boomers came of age in the late sixties all Americans were polite and well behaved.

Just how polite and well-behaved was America back then?

Americans were SO polite in those days that no conversation among white people was complete until there was at least one use of the N-word AND at least one additional gratuitous ethnic slur applied to one other minority. An entire conversation devoted solely to putting down Negroes was considered an opportunity lost. How rude!

Americans were SO polite in those days that they made sure their police had attack dogs to politely teach manners to anyone who asked for too many rights. If that didn’t work, they would break out the flip-flops. Ha, ha, that was a joke. No, they would break out the ax handles. In a polite society, minorities know their place!

Americans were SO polite that we never let women and children talk about sex. Only men were allowed the power to do that, in private. As a result, when American children were raped by people they trusted and the children tried to report it to other adults, they were accused of being vulgar and had their mouths washed out with soap and water. In a polite society rape victims shut up!

In 1964 some Concerned Citizen would’ve stepped up to that flip-flop wearing lacrosse playing commie tomboy-if-she’s-not-a-lesbian freak in the White House and given her the sucker punch in the gut she had coming to her. In a polite society, women toe the line!

That’s how polite America was, before we baby boomers ruined everything.

Birds Are Nuts

This is going to be one of those columns that isn't about anything. All the conditions point to it. For one thing, all the news is too depressing to write about here. You can only make fun of North Korea so much, and then people start to whimper. Iraq isn't at all funny anymore. The economy is only good for about ten lines and then I remember that my rent is due. Then Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I used to sleep" Freeman insists that I pick up malted milk balls for her at the store. A dollar eighty-nine. For a stinking bag of malted milk balls.

The good news: I'm back on my meds. The bad news: I'm back on my meds. No more interestingly bizarre perspectives. No more am I able to write pages and pages extolling the virtues of experiencing paper cuts and surviving.

It's times like this that being scattered is all I have. It's my anti-foundation, a non-solid core to wrap myself around. All my security emanates from my liquid centerlessness. Without it I would have to settle down and be something, which would surely result in doom. If that doesn't make sense to you, then you understand more than you know.

Mr. Stephens taught me that you could be scattered and still collect a paycheck. Mr. Stephens was my 8th grade math teacher. He was stark raving scattered. He would spend the first minute of every class going over the answers to the homework due that day. Like this: "The answers were 5, 17, 16.3, and 1." Then he would spend 50 minutes telling us about his house on Mercer Island, and about the patio he just built over his carport, and how he built part of the patio around a tree, and about how we should all respect how cool that was. Then Mr. Stephens would spend the last four minutes giving us the next day's homework.

At the same time I was taking "business principles" from Mrs. Wilson (these are not the real names.) "Business principles" was all about how to write out a check, mostly. I don't know how the schools got away with wasting kids time like that in those days. I hope they do better now. But Mrs. Wilson wasn't satisfied with just wasting our time with the syllabus. She felt it was necessary to spend at least thirty minutes of each class telling us how her daughter was a swimmer for the US Olympic team, and she won a silver medal for something. I learned that Mrs. Wilson's daughter got the silver approximately sixty times. That is roughly equal to the number of spitwads that I personally landed on Mrs. Wilson when her back was turned, during that term.

Why am I telling you this? I just want you all to know things could be worse. In addition to being scattered I could be a broken record, like my unbelievably neurotic middle-school teachers. But at least when I scatter, I scatter in a different direction every time.

Speaking of broken records, Groundhog Day just passed. No I'm not thinking about the Bill Murray movie, although that was good. Instead I'm thinking about a green singing finch I adopted on Groundhog's day 1990. I called him Zino, after the violinist Zino Francescatti, and he was a fantastic broken record. Apparently, birds are the ultimate broken records. They do not know the concept of "enough".

Zino had this trick where he would jump off his perch and attach himself up-side-down to the top of his cage. Then he would drop back to his perch, doing a back flip in the process. All this would be done to elicit a "wow" from me. Then he would do it again, to get another "wow". Then again, for another "wow". And again and again. Until finally I couldn't take it anymore. When I couldn't say "wow" anymore Zino might quit after one or two more times. But he never quit as long as the "wows" came.

I want to believe there is a lesson in all this for all humanity. From a back flip obsessed bird to a patio obsessed neurotic math teacher to a silver medal obsessed neurotic business principles teacher, I want to draw a moral for all of us to live by.

How's this? -- Everybody be careful what you say "wow" to.

Don't Flip me No U-235

Well, now I'm distracted again. Saturday I was trucking right along, doing what I usually do, namely contemplate the meaninglessness of existence. That is, I was thinking how I was OK with the meaninglessness of existence as long as it (the existence) continued unabated and without any serious dips in quality. And then CNN reports that 34.6 pounds of possibly weapons-grade uranium was found in a Turkish taxi.

34.6 pounds of U-235 here, 34.6 pounds of U-235 there, & pretty soon, holy crap, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

As many of you know I have a naturally distractible constitution. I take pills for it and nice doctors help me find ways to cope with irrational anxieties and fears BUT THIS ISN'T ONE OF THE IRRATIONAL ONES.

So I am coping away anyhow, ha, ha, thinking about taxi driving. There's nothing like a cab story to make me think of my own old cab driving days.

I drove for one of Seattle's big taxi companies back in the eighties when cab driving in Seattle sucked. I don't like to say the name of the cab company 'cause they still might have hard feelings about it all, but their cabs were green.

In those days I was even crazier than I am now and the dispatchers knew it so they didn't bother me too much. They let me sleep in my cab all I wanted and gave most of the good business to the one or two sane drivers. But sometimes the dispatchers would wake me up, if they had something that really seemed urgent, because they knew that I was kind of geeky and that on account of that they could trust me to find most any address.

So one day when I was up in North Seattle I was told over the radio to go to Stevens hospital in Edmonds and "get the package." Even though I'd never been to Stevens, the dispatcher was sure that I could find it. It was wonderful to inspire such confidence and I drove out there glowing with pride for being so useful.

I wondered what it would be this time. Once it had been a cornea. I had wondered what the recipient would say if he/she knew that the cab driver that brought it to the hospital was a homeless man who couldn't, himself, afford cab fare. Sometimes I carried blood samples for AIDS testing. Once it was a mystery organ in an ice chest. The most important package I ever hauled was a heart monitor that I drove 100 miles to where it was needed for a child's surgery.

I loved the hospital package runs. Not only was I performing a valuable and possibly life-saving service, but also vouchers paid for the trips in advance and the passengers never started an argument.

Well, the package at Stevens turned out to be a bag of excrement bound for the Swedish Hospital pharmacy.

Now, I had enough sense to ask the people sending it what the Swedish Hospital needed with a bag of excrement. I mean, couldn't they provide their own, etc. But I was firmly told that the Swedish Hospital pharmacy would know what to do with it, and not to worry myself about it. So I shut up and took the bag and my voucher and headed south.

I made good time, so I was fairly happy when I set the bag on the counter at Swedish and announced, "package from Stevens." Then the pharmacist opened the package, looked in, and shouted at me, "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS SH*T??!!

Damn my hide. I told him, "That, the hell, is exactly what that is." Then I tried to settle him by telling him, not to worry, it was paid for.

Speaking of not worrying – of course any geek could tell you instantly that there was no way that could have been 34.6 pounds of U-235 in that Turkish cab, or the stuff would've been too hot to handle. Literally.

Now I wonder, why did they say it might have been bound for Iraq, when all the signs were it was going to Syria? It was found near the Syrian border. You don't have to go through Syria to get to Iraq from Turkey.

You'd think someone out there WANTS us to worry, wouldn't you?

Second Happ'nin

Last year we here at Real Change celebrated our seventh year of putting out this rag. We did this for two reasons. One, any excuse for a party. Two, "seven" has Biblical significance. You've got seven days of creation, seven years of feast, seven years of famine, seven seals of the Book of Judgment, stuff like that. We wanted to plug in to that kind of action, 'cause the Bible is happ'nin.

Of course the feast/famine scenario did concern me at the time. I wondered what the next seven years could bring, given that the first seven went reasonably well. I thought, uh-oh, the second seven just likely may be reasonably rotten.

So far my fear has been realized. Seven years of Real Change was followed within the month by 9/11/01 and the ensuing economic downturn and social paranoia.

You'd think that as more people face poverty there would be more appreciation for those who have already been poor, but it doesn't work like that. You'd think that when someone earning, say, fifty thousand a year, has had to take a five thousand dollar annual pay cut, the hardship might help her/him identify with the guy who gets next to nothing on GAU, but NO. Instead, he/she blames the guy on GAU for the missing five thousand.

Many times this past year, lying awake at night, spinning the wheels in my brain, I have wondered what would have happened if all the victims on 9/11 had been homeless. Suppose, instead of flying planes into those towers, the same terrorists had managed to simultaneously bomb and obliterate twenty or thirty fully occupied homeless shelters all across the US. I hate to say it, but I don't think we would be in a recession now. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think we would be talking now about eliminating Saddam Hussein. I don't even think we would have attacked the Taliban or pursued Osama to the edge of the world. I think the general American public would have shrugged the whole thing off the way they shrug off famine in Somalia.

The good news: war with Iraq will probably only last a few weeks. The bad news: nothing good will be accomplished by it. Oh, some weapons of mass destruction might get destroyed, but only by means of mass destruction. An evil dictator will lose power, but the resulting turmoil will grow new evil dictators. The American economy will not benefit from the brief war; it will only serve to raise expectations in time for the November elections. In fact, if the war doesn't happen by November, it will probably be postponed altogether until 2004.

Don't get me wrong. Real Change itself is doing OK in its second seven years. But our environment has taken a noticeable turn for the worse. I wouldn't call it famine yet, but I wouldn't exactly call it feast either. Knock on wood.

So you all should understand why I haven't been too terribly eager to admit that this column just passed its own seven-year mark in August. "Anniversary? What anniversary? Look! Isn't that Osama bin Laden over there in the rugby shirt and jeans? (Columnist runs and hides.)"

Yes. I have been doing this for seven years, and the thought of that puts me in the mind to run away to Bora Bora. What could the next seven years be like? Will I again succumb to duck-licking? Will my muse, Cindy Holly, stick with me? Will I ever write in iambic tetrameter again?

Looking back at the last seven years is hard for me, because there are so few successes. OK, so we didn't end homelessness. I don't know how, but we screwed that one up. We also didn't end poverty. I kick myself every day for that.

On the other hand, we have had our victories. Or we can pretend that we have. For instance, this is the second column in a row in which we have used the word "happ'nin". But we are most proud of convincing the Seattle Times that "Dilly Dally Alley" was an icky name for their comics page (see "induced retching", this column, May 16, '02.)

In seven years, the Times comics page. In fourteen years, who knows? Maybe something pretty good.

It's a Happ'nin!

Recently I was talking about how I am stupid. I was saying, actually, that everyone is stupid. The trick is to figure out, for each one of us, how. One of the ways that I am stupid is that I suck at history.

I don't completely suck at history. For example, I can be a part of history, no problem. You could in theory go back to certain of those old news tapes of events ("happ'nins") in the sixties and find me. OK, I would be the guy on the edge of the shot looking like I got lost on the way to the chess club, but I'm, like, there.

My problem is, I don't know where there was. In the case of the sixties this makes me good at history, because there wasn't any there there, actually. But it doesn't work for other times.

I first realized how much I was going to suck at history right at the beginning, when my third grade teacher was explaining to my class that history had to do with things like the Hundred Years War and some French girl who got herself burned at the stake and that that would be on the test. I looked around and I didn't see any charred remains, know what I mean? How should I know this girl got roasted? Then I found out that we were even supposed to know WHEN she got roasted, down to the exact year, and that it was HUNDREDS of years ago, and I knew this history thing was not for me.

One of my big problems with history was figuring out why, when we were talking about battles and what famous people were getting burned at the stake, THAT was history, but when we were talking about, say, ancient customs and what kind of culture they had, our history books were supposed to be closed because talking about culture was some kind of social studies. If history isn't social studies, what is it? I still don't get that.

Sometimes people come along with audio-visual aids that help. So back when Masterpiece Theater showed its TV version of Winston Churchill's book, the First Churchills, I learned a thing or two about history then. I learned, among other things, what papists were, that there were such people as Roundheads, that in the olden days (at least ca 1700) everybody was incredibly erudite, and that there might be worse things than just being burned at the stake, parts of you could be burned separately in front of you. Ouch!

The other thing I learned was that Winston Churchill, a former prime minister of England, who wrote the book, must have been incredibly erudite himself. Or else he couldn't have wrote it.

Speaking of audio-visual aids, I believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also must suck at history but unlike me doesn't know it, has been watching too much of the History Channel. Mr. Rumsfeld is displaying all the signs of a man whose knowledge of the history of the world consists mainly in knowing how to make blowing up sounds. I wouldn't mind but now he's favorably comparing George W. Bush to the afore-mentioned Winston Churchill.

I mean, I didn't know Churchill. He wasn't a friend of mine. But shee-yeah, right.

I'd be less likely to scoff if Rumsfeld wanted to call GW Bush the William McKinley of the new millennium. Not that Churchill wasn't an imperialist in his own day, he was, he was, but I can visualize Bush being McKinleyesque without cracking up.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this column. What I wanted to talk about was the art of making blowing up sounds. I don't think it's wrong to be good at making blowing up sounds. I think it's a shame that more people aren't practiced at making convincing explosive noises with their mouths.

I firmly believe that the reason Rumsfeld and Bush want war with Iraq is because they have no buddies to play war with who can make good artillery and blowing up sounds.

I urge everyone who is adept at making blowing up sounds to contact the White House and offer their services in this regard. Thank you.