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WALKING ON THE MOON IS EASIER

7/28/2012

WALKING ON THE MOON IS EASIER
   President George W. Bush’s spokesman announced that “W” will not be at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.   "President Bush was grateful for the invitation... But he's still enjoying his time off the political stage and respectfully declined the invitation.” The great whooshing sound that followed was Republican strategists breathing a sigh of relief.
   Former Presidents are ordinarily de facto party leaders. Getting to walk on the moon is easier than getting into the Oval Office and each ex-prez had made it. Having one at a Convention reminds voters of success. Yet Mitt Romney did not see fit to personally ask “W” to reconsider. That’s because "W" will remind voters of failure.
   George W. Bush is the one person Republicans must keep out of sight and out of mind. First, he left office with the lowest approval rating of any outgoing President except convicted felon. Richard M. Nixon. But the real reason is that the very G.W. Bush policies that sank the U.S. economy are the ones they want voters to buy into. Again. Seeing George W. Bush is seeing the face of failure, and the last thing they want voters to think of when they enter the voting booth in November.
    Separating "W" from his failed [policies will be difficult, but master schemer. Karl Rove and his cohort, will do their best, using subterfuge, trickery, lying, contempt for American voters, and keeping G.W. Bush out of sight.
    “That is why "W” will watch the convention on TV, unless he’d rather put the whole sorry business behind him and go see Batman. Who could blame him?

THE PAIN AND STRAIN IS MAINLY IN THE BRAIN

7/26/2012

        The Pain and Strain is Mainly in the Brain
   Invited into a study of brain aging. Telephone call from “Megan,” soft voice and youthful accent. Met her at the first visit, a psychology grad, sweet face, gentle smile, like the face I’d imagined on WW II bombing raids to remind myself why I was fighting.
   Preliminaries: Name our President. Vice-President. What year? What season? Today’s date? The last stumped me. I never know the date. Resolved not to show up again without a glance at the newspaper for the date.
   Turned over to an M.D. for a basic medical, then on to another psych major. This one looked like Hedy Lamar. (The most beautiful woman since Helen of Troy. Google if you don’t believe it.) She took family history including what everyone died of. Then Megan handed me a blank pad. “Draw a cube.”
   Showed me simple drawings to copy, then draw from memory. A touch screen, more questions. Qualifying process over, Megan and the doctor described the actual test: 1) memory, 2) MRI, 3) spinal tap. Spinal fucking tap?
   I told her about how the army tried to scare us out of getting “a dose.” Movie of a bare male back, hand stabs a horse hypodermic into the spine. Back jerks like hit with 110 volts.
   “No, no, nothing like that!” Uh huh.
   Asked me to arrive at 9 AM, changed to 11 after I said my brain sleeps till noon. Glad to see Megan again. She read me a paragraph, asked me to repeat it verbatim. Then something else, then the paragraph again. Tricky.
   Megan read me ten words: peanuts, flour, tangerine, muffin, veal, chicken, clams, three more. Asked to repeat them any order. I got seven. Did it again, and again, maybe again. Never managed all ten.
   Vocabulary test, nothing fancy, Think I aced it.
   Asked to name things that go on the feet; shoes, socks, boots, sneakers, slippers, clogs, skis, mukluks, roller skates, ice skates... Rambled on until I petered out. Later—too late—I thought of snow shoes, toe rings, pointe shoes, and stilts.
   After hearing a list of two words that didn’t really relate like: cold-ink, room-stool, dog-lion, etc., she said one, I had to recall the other. Bad at this.
   Showed me a triangle with a number inside. Then other shapes, each with a number. Shown the shape without the number, I had to recall the number. Terrible at this.
   Presented a page of numbers, like:
       5 - 2 8 5 3 2 0 8 7 1 9 6 4 5 3 8 1 5 3 7
   Had to put a slash through every number that matched the first
   Given a clicker to click as many times as I could in 10 seconds. Three times with each hand. Finished with another touch screen. All-in-all, it was kind of fun.
   The MRI and Spinal Tap were in a lab eight blocks away. Declined taxi fare and walked. Before getting on the gurney I asked the nurse, “What’s the mortality rate for spinal taps?”
   “Zero!” she said indignantly. I didn’t feel the needle go in.
   Lastly, the MRI. Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Lie down ears plugged, head propped in a machine of deafening bombinations.
   An assistant handed me 50 dollars. “Cab fare.”
   “I live eight blocks away.”
   “We budget for Queens,” walked me out the door, hailed a taxi and shoved me into it.
   A year and a half from now I’ll know if I’m getting smarter, holding my own, or the brain is going down the drain. One thing sure, I’ll know the date.

THE BAD OLD DAYS ARE NOW

7/24/2012

                     The Bad Old Days Are Now
   After a dozen NRA-authorized movie theater murders, super creep James Holmes appeared in court with the gutted look of someone who’d succeeded in acting out his fever dream. Those seeking “a motive” better have a PhD in psychopathology.
   Meanwhile, the 800-pound gorilla that nobody dare notice is Gun Control. The nut cases of the National Rifle Association have succeeded in banishing it to a political no-man’s land and whomever ventures there will be cut down in a hail of hot rhetoric. The only exception is NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg who doesn’t count because he’s close to the end of his mayoralty, has no known political ambitions, and with billions of dollars, can say anything he wants.
   Barack Obama would love to have a few sane rules passed, but considering the hysteria roiling the land, doesn’t need the additional problem of a lunatic NRA running more amok than usual. And the U.S.A. needs him to solve bigger problems than the sick depredations of gun creeps mowing people down on malls, college campuses, and in movie theaters.
   Back in the 1950s, hardly a week went by without a newspaper story of a sickening murder by a crazed lynch mob in what was called the Deep South. Today we look back with horror. Yet each horror has its day: slavery, Concentration Camps, Gulag, Great Leap Forward. Each peaked, and passed. Gun violence too will pass, to be remembered as a grotesque aberration in the “bad old days,” which happen to be right now this minute.
   But these bad old days will stretch on and on if the perps and apologists are allowed to creep back into office. They will lie, cheat, disenfranchise, stuff ballet boxes, hack voting machines, and buy votes, Don’t expect Rob-the-middle-class-Romney, with the conscience of a cash register, to lift a pinkie to stop them. Keep that when in mind you enter the ballot box come November.

BATMAN; TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE? THAT IS THE QUESTION.

7/22/2012

        Batman: To See Or Not To See?
              That Is the Question.
   Ordinarily I wouldn’t see any Batman movie, including one with a pompous title like, “The Dark Knight Rises. But...
   1) A rave review in The New York Times.
   “Savior and destroyer, human and beast, the ultimate radical individualist, ...layered with open and barely veiled references to terrorism and the surveillance state and vengeance as a moral imperative...invokes the Sept 11 attacks,,, Batman stands between right and wrong, principals and their perversions,, because he himself incarnates both extremes.”
   Harks back to the word mazes of Jacques Derridah and Michel Foucault, who glibly prove that anything can mean anything. Still, one vote for seeing it.
   2) Rush Limbaugh thinks it’s Democrat propaganda.
   “The villain in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran? ... Bain. ... Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire-breathing, four-eyed whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane? ... Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain — Romney and Bain — these people will think back to the Batman movie, ‘Oh, yeah, I know who that is,’”
   Democrat strategists are not that clever but, it’s another vote for.
   3) Scene of the worst lunatic NRA murder binge in history.
   Blessed by the lunatic creeps of the National Rifle Association, super creep James Holmes, despite being gas masked, dressed in Ninja black, and armed with four loaded guns purchased legally, got into the showing in Aurora, Colorado, killed a dozen and and wounded scores. International headlines. Batman stockholders terrified that box office may take a hit because of terrified Joe Sixpacks, their families, and mall rats of both sexes. But it might also get a bump from carrion eaters and zombies seeking vicarious thrills.
    As for me, the hell with it.

MORE MURDERS FOR THE NRA RAP SHEET

7/20/2012

    More Murders For the NRA Rap Sheet
   The latest shooting in Colorado, 14 dead, dozens wounded, elicits the usual media wailing with many uses of the word, “tragedy.” Hamlet is a tragedy. Oedipus Rex is a tragedy. But one more deranged killer running amok with deadly weapons is a crime to add to the grisly rap sheet of the NRA, and every politico who grovels before it.
   A few dozen mass murders ago, public pressure often turned against lack of gun control, the real source of the problem, weapons available to any lunatic, insanely pushed by the NRA and its pathological fight against common sense. The NRA fought back--“guns don’t kill people, people kill people”—counting on the fact that after enough shooting sprees, hundreds killed, it would become the new normal and people would learn to suck it up. Nothing to be done. That’s life.
   One day some crazed person driven mad by the loss of a loved one in another “tragic” shooting, will buy up an arsenal, don a suicide vest, sneak into NRA headquarters, shoot everyone on sight and blow the rest up. That’s life.

DYING GASPS OF THE BAD OLD DAYS

7/18/2012

FREE SYRIAN ARMY FIGHTERS

         Dying Gasps of the Bad Old Days
   The U.N has officially classified the fighting in Syria as a civil war. This may eventually benefit desperate Syrians by defining war crimes, and also throws a harsh spotlight on China and Russia, whose repugnant support of a hideous tyranny ignores death raining down upon Syrian civilians, women, and children,
   China and Russia defy the UN and disgust the world as they turn blind eyes to wholesale murder by a criminal regime insanely clinging to power over people who want only a breath of the Arab Spring. Fighting has come to Damascus with two members of the Assad inner circle killed today, Bashar al-Assad, if not killed like fellow tyrant Muammar al-Gadafi, will one day stand before the International Court of Justice.
   Meanwhile the cynical rationales of China and Russia force us to recall the sorry history of many countries, U.S.A. included, which supported evil regimes for political or economic reasons. In South America, we propped up dictators either because we feared they’d be toppled by communists, or to prop up some vampire banana, rubber, coffee, or oil baron draining their wealth. England, France, Holland, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Imperial Japan, Russia and China, all had empires.
   The U.S. has pretty much shucked off its empire. Great Britain let some go (like us) kept connected to others with its Commonwealth, sort of a ghost empire, allowing Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, Granada, the Falklands, Gibralter, and others to enjoy their distinct nationalities and still feel British. But Russia, which attempted to Russify and absorb its satellites, turned most of them into enemies with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and China to this day denies anything approaching nationhood, calling those it absorbed, “minorities.”
    This retro behavior is a cold attempt to keep a mid-East foothold. But with all-out civil war now in progress, it is contrary to common sense. And with the inevitable fall of Assad, ties to his bloody hegemony will brand Russia and China as enemies of regimes that follow. China and Russia have produced geniuses in every field, but the behavior of its power elite seems to be only a mindless reflex from the bad old days of centuries past.

ROMNEY PSEUDO-RAP, or, WHITE BREAD MADE THIS COUNTRY GREAT

7/16/2012

willard Mitt Romney, in France

                   Romney Pseudo-Rap, or,
        White Bread Made This Country Great
          (Perform to music with a weak beat)
Willard Romney, call him Mitt
He’s a guy who just won’t quit
Twelve long years since he began
Running for Prez, now he’s The Man.
Our Candidate Republican
Wants to be President, next election
Twenty twelve, Secret Service protection
Doesn’t drink Coca-Cola or any hard liquor,
A White Bread candidate, don’t snicker
It’s time you started to appreciate,
White Bread made this country great.
       - Pause -
Willard Romney, call him Mitt,
His great granddad was a Brit
Sailed across the Atlantic ocean
Settled in Utah, “land o’ Goshen.”
Wanted a big family
Got a wife, then two, then three
But the country wasn’t ready for polygamy
Pretty soon the Feds came down
Mitt’s great granddad had to skip town
Jumped the border into Mexico
Bought property from Porfirio
Where his daddy, George, was born,
But Mexico was too war torn
A guy named Emiliano Zapata
Turned it into a hot piňata
When he started his revolution
There was only one solution
Back again to Salt Lake City
Next thing you know, they’re sitting pretty
        - Pause -
Willard’s dad became CEO
Of American Motors, don’t ya know,
Then Michigan governor, what a bounce!
Inspired young Mitt to announce,
“Some day I’ll be famous like dear old dad
But richer!” An ambitious lad.
Went to college, draft deferred,
Then France as a missionary, draft demurred
Back to college in the Vietnam war
Most students against it, young Mitt for
But safely married with kids to Anne
Never served as a soldier man
        - Pause -
Got law and high finance degrees
Made big bucks, keeps it in deep freeze
Bermuda, the Caymans, overseas.
Asked about his income tax
Revealed one year, and that’s the max
      - Pause -
Of course it’s perfectly law abidin’
But makes you wonder, what’s he hidin’?
   - Pause -
The thing about Willard, call him Mitt
You know for sure that he’s no twit
That noble brow, that steely glance,
That open shirt, those denim pants
A business man, he didn’t make Billions
Only a few hundred millions
So Mitt is middle class, you see
Like friends and neighbors, you and me
Sweet wifey Anne says he’s a doll
And a seriously conservative pol
     - Pause -
Mitt plays political “Simon Says”
You say, he’ll do, if you make him Prez
Obamacare’s finished. He’ll lower your tax
Kick Aliens out! Jobs to the max
But how will he do it? Says. “Leave it to me
I’m a business man, know economy.”
Campaigning now, when he gets to you
Listen politely, and please don’t boo
Clap and cheer and wave Mitt banners
Always display your party manners
He doesn’t drink Coca-Cola or any hard liquor,
He’s the White Bread candidate, don’t snicker
It’s time you started to appreciate,
White Bread made this country great!
   - Music fades -
      [to be continued]

IT'S BEAUTIFUL,POWERFUL, AND ORIGINAL. BUT IS IT ART?

7/14/2012

ARTIST AT WORK

   Twenty-First Century Art - By The Numbers
   It was 1972 and my college dance majors needed a music teacher. Electronically generated tones on quarter inch tape was a growing craze and they wanted to learn to make their own dance scores. One candidate for the job said he’d only teach electronic music to students who passed his regular music test. I hired him. Students resigned themselves to his rigor. It was still music’s Jurassic age.
     The world of digital opens doors to “composers” who need only learn a computer program like ACID, which supplies millions of sounds to be “painted” on staffs, listened to, fiddled with, and recorded directly onto CDs, complete with copyright notices. I use it myself in a mental state that flips between wonder and despair. My “music” serves its purpose—rap or dance class or video accompaniment, not noticeably worse than the tracks, bands, and grooves disgorged daily on the media, most with as much individuality as herrings in a school. And yet, if someone never exposed to music but with the talent of a Mozart got hold of ACID, might not something come into existence that would never otherwise have emerged?
   So I’m waiting for the same kind of computer program for visual art, way beyond Photoshop or Corel Draw. Center screen is a “canvas,” on which you can drag thousands of image elements: sunsets, clouds, mountains, skies, animals, trees, flowers, houses, machines, body parts -- eyebrows to toenails. There’s “style” and “influence" sheets to help you make something romantic, art deco, primitive, abstract expressionist, or influenced by Rembrandt, Picasso, Klee, Mondrian, Kandinsky, etc. Always on sale are add-ons with new content, styles, and influences.
   To “create” your own original work, you drag elements onto the canvas where you can change colors, shapes, textures, etc., and manipulate them like a supercharged Photoshop. And if you have a microgram of talent, you can use the “pencil tool” or "paintbrush" to draw or paint something yourself. When you’ve come up with a finished work, you print it out in glorious color, sign it, frame it, put it on the wall, or send it to your gallery to be bought by wealthy art collectors.
   Sic transit gloria mundi.

FIAT LUX! "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" or, SCIENCE, DEEP REALITY, and TRUTH

7/12/2012

    FIAT LUX! “Let There Be Light!,” or,
        Science, Deep Reality, and Truth
   Scientists are excitedly greeting the Higgs Bosun, the “God(damn) Particle,” which proves the existence the Higgs Field, without which there would be no planets, stars, galaxies, or universe, as we know it. The Higgs Field fills space, a sort of cosmic molasses through which everything including ourselves must flow. Without it, our sun would fly apart and so would we.
   Scientists have long grappled with what existed before the Big Bang, some even saying that space, time, and substance flashed into existence out of nothing and there is no before. Something from nothing is not scientific, although those who believe in a Creator have no trouble with it.
   Early scientific geniuses like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein saw no conflict between science and God. Einstein’s famous “I can’t believe that God plays dice with the Universe,” made him reject Quantum Theory. Stephen Hawking said, “Einstein was wrong... Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.”
   Black Holes and Quantum Mechanics dislodged the “everything-from-nothing theory,” so scientists, who build their theories on evidence, devised others. One is a kind of all-pervading before, and dimensions filled with branes (don’t ask), which occasionally bump up against one another, each bump igniting a Big Bang.
   Just what branes are and where they come from is yet to be deeply defined, although one day they will be because science, driven to learn and constantly changing, is different from religions which, believing they already know everything worth knowing, stick with their beliefs. Yet some do change. The Catholic Church, for instance, which in 1633 forced Galileo to deny that the Earth circled the Sun, in 1951 accepted the Big Bang Theory.
   My personal theology drives me to follow the mind-bending discoveries of science with bated breath. Each advance carries human thought, and humanity itself, a tiny bit closer to Deep Reality, or Truth, which may, after all, be other words for God.

NO IDEA SO GOOD IT CAN'T BE RUINED BY JERKS

7/10/2012

        No Idea Is So Good It Can’t Be Ruined by Jerks
   If you ever meet someone carrying a sign like the one in the photo, here’s what you can say:
   “What’s up, doc?”
   “Why worry? Be happy!”
   “Can I buy you a beer?”
   What you can’t say is that “Medicade” [sic] is a “Govment” [sic] operation. He knows that’s a lie.
   Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will.”) has corollaries: 1) There is no situation so bad it can’t be made worse. 2) No idea is so good it can’t be ruined by jerks. One of the best ideas ever, Democracy, goes back to ancient Greece, yet is terra incognita to the stalwart sign bearer in the photo. In 2007 the world had 123 electoral democracies. Each was different but all shared five basic tenets:
   1 Every individual has worth.
   2 All are basically equal.
   3 Majority rules, but the minority has rights
   4 Each individual has the widest possible liberties.
   5. Compromise to resolve differences.
       Our Founding Fathers opted to elect the President, with a bicameral Congress—Senate and House of Representatives—modeled, it seems clear, after the British House of Lords and House of Commons, plus a Supreme Court (instead of a king) to settle disputes. When British aristocracy faded, the House of Lords faded too, so today power is with the House of Commons, which can have any number of political parties. The majority party elects the Prime Minister. If no party wins a majority, two or more get together to form a government. Minor parties can win seats, so even radicals can have a voice in government.
   Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, suggest we switch to a multi-party system because the fracturing of American politics has paralyzed our two-party winner-take-all system. Past third parties: Green Party, Libertarian Party, Conservative Party, Liberal Party, Reform Party, America First Party, Vegetarian Party, Rent Is Too Damn High Party, American Nazi Party, and more, drew one-issue protest votes, and with no hope of winning could be as radical as they liked. Now, a radicalized Republican party acting like a protest party, rejecting compromise— a basic tenet of democracy—and backed by a secret cohort of billionaires, could conceivably win.
   The decline and fall of the Roman Empire ended up liberating Europe. Were the U.S.A. to decline and fall, contracting to within its borders (as Ron Paul wants), the world would pretty well work out things without our dollars or leadership. But how would we do without the rest of the world? The guy in the photo holding the sign would say, “Great! And you can take that to the bank!”
   Just be sure that the bank is not in the U.S.A.

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal