WALL STREET BAILOUT BENEFIT CONCERT: Stop the Pain From Trickling Up!

“Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.”
-- H. L. Mancken, “A Little Book in C Major” (1916)

Featuring: The Doors, Ski-Doos, Elvis Presley, Bonds Unchained, George Bedard and the Kingpins, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin, Sarah Palin and the Man-Whores, Miles Davis, FUBAR, John McCain and the New Cadavers, Walrus, Hare Pye, Otis Redding, Stevie Ray Vaughn, The New Barbarians, Blind Faith, John Denver, Jim Croce (he’ll be letting the time out of that god damned bottle) and much much more!

Friends, you’ve all heard of Farm-Aid, the Concert for Bangladesh, and the Behnke Family Benefit, and these were all, of course, worthy causes, but the benefit to be held this February 31st eclipses all others in terms of urgency.

Imagine, dear friends, jumping off of the World Trade Center and not having your Golden Parachute open. Sound chilling? There’s more. Imagine taking trillions of dollars and squandering it on universal health insurance, education, and federal funding for rebuilding an aging infrastructure (the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, wastewater, power grids, etc.), thus providing jobs as a stimulus to the economy. Even more insidious is the thought of allowing noble companies like AIG Insurance Group to fold.

What? You say you’re uninsured. Well whose fault is that? Not the federal government. Get a job and quit the food stamps, instead of crying to the government for a handout. There’s an old Skandia saying: give a person a dollar and they’ll be rich for a day, teach them how to make money, and they’ll be rich for a lifetime. And lastly, imagine that most heinous of possibilities, wasting the trillions spent in the fight for our freedom, the war against terrorism, the war on those turbaned fanatics with their non-appealing, burka wearing, dung breathed, oppressed women, and spending it on domestic problems. Is that fucked up, or what? Imagine Osama bin Laden setting up camp in the Apostle islands, poisoning our pasties, and sheathing our women. Oh woe is us! What next, an Hijabs-R-Us outlet on M28? This war is about more than protecting Escanaba. This is a culture war. Can you imagine Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Sarah Palin photos absent cleavage? No tits to gawk at, no more Déjà vu bottomless, after hours, cunt oogling? Talk about sick.

Now do you understand why the bailout is so wise? Now do you understand why we need to call our representatives and tell them to ignore that itty bitty clause that stipulates no oversight and an unlimited ceiling on the funds to be used?

So come on out! See Macko in a duet with Janis, singing “Motor City King.” See the Walrus’ 45 minute version of “Season of the Witch.” See Elvis bring down the house covering Jethro Tull’s “Don’t Want to be a Fat Man.” See Janis croon her liver out doing Jimmy Rodgers “Sloppy Drunk.” Witness Jim Morrison’s stirring rendition of Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out some Insurance.” Marvel at Sarah and the Man-Whores over the top cover of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.” And finally, don’t miss The New Cadavers’ cover of Iggy’s “Bull Dozer.”

Where? Ground Zero, lower Manhattan. You know, the financial district. Recall that Governor Patacki of New York was very cautious about providing financial renumeration to workers who claimed health problems related to 9/11. I’m sure he’ll be much more generous in supporting the brave CEOs who’ve had to weather the Katrina on Wall Street.

Please support a noble cause, and attend this most worthy concert.

Sincerely – Hank “The Butcher” Kissinger

LOS CHICKENS LIVES! Epitaph for Charlie Tysklind

Charlie Tysklind had a look. I think he was born in St. James Infirmary with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Imagine a composite photograph of Tom Waits, David Johansen, and Jack Palance. This image would still fail to approximate the authentic blues-raunch look Charlie affected. To my knowledge, Charlie played in The Blue Front Persuaders, Killer Trout, and Los Chickens. I’m talking here about the heyday of Mr. Flood’s Party in the late 70s and early 80s. As I recall, and my memories from this period are fuzzy at best, outrageous debabauchery and profligate decadence defined the short tenure of the Chickens. Charlie had no formal training. He played with what I would describe as an A.D.D. high octane adrenaline style. Think of Albert Ayler, Red Prysock, and Pharoah Sanders on amphetamines, and you’ve got some idea of his approach. His playing had three gears: hard, harder, and hardest. Couple Charlie’s weathered countenance with Brophy Dale’s (Brophy now lives in L.A. where he plays guitar for Lee Rocker, former bass player for the Stray Cats) Tex-Brit Ronnie Wood look and you’ve got a mental snapshot of Los Chicken’s front grill. “My Gal Is Red Hot,” “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” and other such gut-growling jump psychobilly numbers had to have been written with a future Charlie Tysklind in mind. The photo above, taken by Miss Wendy Smith in front of Floods, includes, from left to right: Johnny Morgan in the foreground (younger brother of the Rationals' Scott Morgan), Brophy Dale, with the black Silvertone guitar, Dr. Dave Cavender (trumpet and harmonica), yours truly, in the stripes with the Music Man Sabre Bass, and Charlie.

The Killer Trout shot is, left to right, Brophy Dale, Charlie, and Doug Koernke. In the background is Andy Boller on the piano.

The Blue Front Persuaders shot is, left to right, Steve Wethy, Carl Hildebrandt, Mark Russell, Charlie, and Bob Cantu.

I haven’t posted much lately because I spend most of my time reading and evaluating horrid student writing. Sorry. Last night, George Bedard and the Kingpins played the Lansing Blues Festival. It was way cool and there were many photographers. I’m thinking some pictures will surface somewhere on the net (go to youtube.com, search term George Bedard and the Kingpins, scroll down to New Hawaian Boogie, posted by Scot Allman). One of my new students is Ben Cronin, center for U-Ms basketball team. He is 7 foot tall! He’s asked me to be photographed with him in the 2008 media guide. The shoot is this Friday. Other than that, I have no profound wisdom to impart except this: wouldn’t it be nice if the government bailed us out of our debt, rather than throwing a life line to the fattest of fat cats, who have already received the most outrageous tax breaks this country has ever seen?

SAVE OUR COUNTRY, VOTE OBAMA!

Twilight of Empire?

Q: What's the difference between a pig with lipstick and Sarah Palin?

A: The lipstick.

There is absolutely no truth to the Republican allegations attributing this joke to Barack Obama. First, as Sarah and John would agree, pigs don't wear lipstick. While many animals do, like the Pit Bull and the Crawford Armadillo, pigs, as an example of what Mark Twain called the higher animals, depend on something more than cosmetic qualities as a marker of intelligence. Even a pig wouldn't strip her fellow swine of their innate rights. What we have in Miss Spiggy is a porcine ignoramous that would deny her fellow Petunias the right to choose. Since she's a woman, I guess she can apply her laws to your body. This bimbo is the Barbie version of Clarence Thomas.

If you consider this chauvanistic, ladies, consider the fact that this hawkish deep-throat makes me look like a wannabe sexist. I may be a mysogynist, but I would never deny a woman her right to choose what she does with her own body. My only hope is that it would involve me. Ms. Palin is like a modern day Don Quixote tilting at condoms, diaphrams, and vasectomies, oh my!

I'm a Spermicidal maniac! I'm fixed! Woe is me! My unborn sperm must think of me as the perpetrator of a seminal holocaust. Oh God, what have I done! Think about it, no sperm. What does this say about the shame of my sin of jacking off? Oh me, oh my! Excuse me while I put on my hairshirt.

Pray for me, President Palin. And in your prayers, don't forget to beseech God to guide the deciders on the Alaskan pipeline. Petition God to bring us victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. God guide us in our quest to bestow Arctic oil on our fellow citizens. And God, don't forget the Polar bears. Grant them the power to be like Michael Phelps. And God, please make it so deer can survive on cigarette butts. And God, keep our chidren from conceiving out of wedlock and giving our special children retarded names.

And finally, dearest Father:

Bringer of light,

Mantle of truth,

Garter of justice,

Stopper of tooth decay,

Blessed acid reducer,

Healer of gout,

Please! Please, dear God, grant her the wisdom to know what in the fuck the "Bush Doctrine" is @#$@#$%*GODDAMMIT!

"Photography is Truth," Jean-Luc Godard

"A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow man.
-- Albert Schweitzer

Locked-in syndrome is a catostrophic condition that prevents an individual from voluntarily moving any muscles of the body, other than those that control eye movement. As a result, the individual cannot move or speak, although some communication is possible through blinking or eye movements. Despite the devastating loss of function, an individual with locked-in syndrome is completely conscious and aware, able to think and reason normally. Locked-in syndrome can occur after severe, catastrophic brain injuries.

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

-- Seymour Hersh, May 10, 2004 "The New Yorker"

Art never imitates. It merely takes over what is already present in the real world and makes an aesthetic pattern out of it, or tries to explain it, or tries to relate it to some other aspect of life.

--Anthony Burgess, 1974

Spotted hyenas vary in their folkloric and mythological depictions, depending on the ethnic group from which the tales originate. In East Africa, Tabwa mythology portrays the spotted hyena as a solar animal that first brought the sun to warm the cold earth, while West African folklore generally shows the hyena as symbolizing immorality, dirty habits, the reversal of normal activities, and other negative traits. The Kagura of Tanzania and the Kujamaat of Southern Senegal view hyenas as inedible and greedy hermaphrodites. A mythical African tribe called the Bouda is reputed to house members able to transform into hyenas. Belief in "werehyenas" is so entrenched within the traditional lore of the Bornu people of north-eastern Nigeria, that their language even contains a special word bultungin which translates as "I change myself into a hyena".

FOR A GULLIBLE AND FOOLISH AMERICAN PUBLIC, NO LIPSTICK REQUIRED: Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere? These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies. Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.” Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction. Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators. What I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

-- Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 9/12/08

WORLD COWBOY: :Europe Gave Us Shakespeare and Beethoven; America Gave Us Jesse James and John Wayne."

-- Anipas P. Delotavo Jr., 2003

9/11

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, 1921

aBoUt BIID

“You can pay a surgeon to suck fat from your thighs, lengthen your penis, augment your breasts, redesign your labia, even (if you are a performance artist) implant silicone horns in your forehead or split your tongue like a lizard’s. Why not amputate a limb?”
-- Carl Elliot, “A New Way to Be Mad,” “Atlantic,” December 2000

Berlin Germany, New South Wales, San Rafael California, Launceston Tasmania, Montreal Quebec, Yonkers New York; over the last two days these are just some of the places that have gone to this blog looking for information on BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder). I’m not sure if this has to do with the dearth of information on the subject, or the silent, but sizeable number of folks who suffer this affliction.

You may recall that I originally posted an essay on this issue as a way of demonstrating the wide variety of topics students come up with when left to their own devices. I found this particular paper, at once, fascinating and disturbing, and, hence, something that might be of interest to my audience. Little did I dream this piece would lead to such an interest in my blog. This, in turn, spurred me to compose two posts. One a short essay on the questions surrounding BIID having to do with medical ethics. The second, an essay rethinking my first conclusion that framed the issue as a matter of choice rather than as a kind of personality disorder.

My thinking turned to the idea that, since BIID is a psychological condition whereby a person desires an amputation because they perceive their body as at odds with the idealized image they have of themselves, there might be, perhaps, psychological therapies that might trick them into thinking the alien limb is missing. And while this made sense according to the classis definition of BIID, it simply couldn’t account for comments on the posts, like that of Sean, informing me that there are manifestations of BIID where one might desire to be paralyzed, or blind, or deaf. If it wasn’t bizarre enough that a person might reject a perfectly healthy limb, here were people obssessed with a wish so incomprehesible to most of us as to be untenable. Sean’s revelation also stripped away the sexual component so often associated with BIID.

And what is this sexual component? It takes two forms, acrotomophilia and apotemnophilia. The acrotomophile is erotically excited by the stump(s) of the amputee partner, or dependent on the appearance or illusion of one's partner as an amputee as a way of achieving arousal and orgasm, or obssessed with an amputated extremity in itself, or the person of the amputee. In the BIIDS vernacular we call these folks “devotees.” A fictional example of this, which I have mentioned previously, would be Manly Pointer, the Bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.”

The correspondent paraphilic condition, self amputation, is referred to as apotemnophilia. The first modern case study of apotemnophilia was published in 1977 by the Johns Hopkins psychologist, John Money. By way of definition, paraphilias are mental disorders characterized by sexual fantasies, urges, or behaviors involving non-human objects (Fetishism, Transvestic Fetishism), suffering or humiliation (Sexual Sadism, Masochism), children (Pedophilia) or other non-consenting persons (Voyeurism, Frotteurism, Exhibitionism). Outside of the medical realm, paraphilias are commonly described as perversions. For those of you unfamiliar with the term frotteurism, it refers to a specific paraphilia which involves the non-consensual rubbing against another person to achieve sexual arousal. The contact is usually with the hands or the genitals and may involve touching any part of the body, including the genital area.

As Carl Elliot’s wonderfully informative December, 2000 “Atlantic” article, “A New Way to Be Mad,” points out: “The grand old man of psychosexual pathology, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, catalogued an astonishing range of paraphilias in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), from necrophilia and bestiality to fetishes for aprons, handkerchiefs, and kid gloves. Some of his cases involve an attraction to what he called ‘bodily defects.’ One was a twenty-eight-year-old engineer who had been excited by the sight of women's disfigured feet since the age of seventeen. Another had pretended to be lame since early childhood, limping around on two brooms instead of crutches. The philosopher Renè Descartes, Krafft-Ebing noted, was partial to cross-eyed women.”

The apotemnophile is referred to as a “wannabe.” For some wannabes, and I qualify this because many wannabes reject the stereotype that all BIID folks be characterized as having a sexual fixation, arrousal and orgasm are contingent on being oneself an amputee. There is a third term in the BIID nomenclature, which may or may not have a sexual aspect, and that is “pretenders.” Pretenders is the label given those who have no disability, but employ wheelchairs, crutches, and braces, typically in public, as a way of feeling disabled.

Having briefly surveyed some of the sexual aspects of BIID, let’s turn to public perceptions of BIID. The standard response is one of disgust and repulsion. Yes, we might identify with the feeling that when one’s, foot, arm, or hand, falls asleep it seems unattached, or alien to us, but the idea of having that appendage removed to remedy this feeling is, for most of us, unassimilable. How can these wackos have these twisted desires when there are so many people experiencing very real, and undesired, pain and suffering? And, as Sean will testify, there were many posted comments to this effect. So it’s no accident that wannabes experience feelings of shame and unworthiness about their obsession. They feel utterly alone in refusing to believe anyone could harbor such bizarre thoughts. They may seek out psychiatric treatment without ever informing the therapist of what they consider to be their deviant underlying desire. They experience repressed feelings of intense jealousy at the sight of an amputee, and that they are alone in the world with their hidden desire to become an amputee.

The upshot of this is that, due to the stigma surrounding this disorder, an accurate assessment of just how many BIID sufferers exist is unavailable. What makes these determinations difficult is that most BIID folks are too ashamed to admit to their problem. The tragedy in all this is that since the chance of a BIID patient having a genuine accidental amputation is infinitesimally small, and because of the major moral, ethical and legal dilemmas involved for the surgeon, the sufferer must create situations in which the limb is traumatically amputated or is so damaged that amputation is necessary. Much as in the case of euthanasia, the unwillingness by Doctors to consider a request that flys in the face of everything they’ve learned about medical ethics, has resulted in a situation where BIID folks make dangerously risky, and more often than not, life threatening decisions.

Again, here’s Elliot: “Healthy people seeking amputations are nowhere near as rare as one might think. In May of 1998 a seventy-nine-year-old man from New York traveled to Mexico and paid $10,000 for a black-market leg amputation; he died of gangrene in a motel. In October of 1999 a mentally competent man in Milwaukee severed his arm with a homemade guillotine, and then threatened to sever it again if surgeons reattached it. That same month a legal investigator for the California state bar, after being refused a hospital amputation, tied off her legs with tourniquets and began to pack them in ice, hoping that gangrene would set in, necessitating an amputation. She passed out and ultimately gave up. Now she says she will probably have to lie under a train, or shoot her legs off with a shotgun.”

Robert Smith, M.D. writes: “The BIID patient with self-injury usually presents with a unusual history of injury and is reluctant to talk about the details of how the injury happened. Common techniques used involve guns, power saws, industrial equipment and railway tracks. Following recent publicity about a BIID patient who froze his leg with dry ice, a number may present with severe cold injury following the application of dry ice. Unlike the typical patient with a medical combination requiring amputation, the BIID patient will show no concern in situations where the surgeon suggest an amputation. They will be very keen to have the amputation completed or may refuse to consider reimplantation or attempts at limb salvage. Patients with cold injury will request amputation immediately. Furthermore, patients with BIID will have a very precise idea of what level of amputation they require.”

In the BBC documentary, “Complete Obsession,” Robert Smith, the now famous surgeon at Scotland’s Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary, who amputated the legs of two wannabes, contends, “that their body is incomplete with their normal complement of four limbs. In a way, most wannabes are of the curious mindset that less is more. For them, an holistic sense of physical identity is only achieved by a kind of somatic subtraction. What I’ve found in my limited research is that the issue of selfhood, rather than sexuality, informs the wannabee mentality. It is a matter of identity, how they see themselves as they were or should be, which begs the question of why they percieve themselves as amputees(see post, “BIID: Philosophical or Medical Issue?”). Again, the vast majority of interviews with wannabees are framed within the langauge of identity, rather than sexual desire, in describing what they feel and why they feel this way.

What’s become clear to me is this: like the wannabes, who are as firm in their convictions about what they want as they are unsure of why they want this, our understanding of BIID, whether it involves what Ian Hacking calls “semantic contagion” (desires prepetuated by the public dissemination of BIID descriptions), sexual deviation, or body image perceptions of identity and selfhood, we are still a long way away from a clear understanding of apotemnophilia.

Peace, my BIID brothers and sisters – Randy Tessier

Snakes on the Plains: The Gospel According to St. Paul

“The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.”
-- Adolph Hitler

Little wonder we didn’t hear much from Bush and Cheney during the Republican National Convention. Presto-chango, ignore the men behind the curtain, the GOP’s new mantra is “Washington is not working,” which is a hilarious fabrication given that the Republican party IS Washington! As a recent Times editorial (9/4) points out, “as hard as he tries, Mr. McCain cannot escape the burdensome shadow of President Bush because his policies offer no real change.” I mean, if you’re going to “drain the swamp” within the beltway you can’t have the residing reptiles holding up signs trumpeting economic “prosperity” and military success.

But who wouldn’t tout prosperity as a Republican virtue when, as The New York Times (9/5) points out, these are “the least diverse, most conservative and richest Republican delegates“ in the history of its tracking data. It’s ironic that the Republicans want to change the disastrous paradigm they’ve created. They’ve been in charge of the White House for the last eight years, and they’ve controlled congress the majority of the time. It’s like they’re running against themselves, but still expect the public gullibility they’ve so dearly counted on--how else could Bush have been elected to a second term--to keep them in power.

Trouble is, McCain’s one of the wartiest toads in the mire. He’s been hunkered in the muck for twenty-eight years, and he’s incubated Bush’s policies for the last eight, voting with him 90% of the time. Do the math, Bush’s popularity is at a 30% approval rate, so….hmmm…if we then, theoretically, of course, extrapolate Bush’s approval rating to McCain’s endorsement of the administrative status quo, if McCain were president he would enjoy a 33% approval rating. And so I ask you my fellow Americans, is this what we want? If elected, McCain’s policies would bring a definite “lack of change.”

Actually, this tactic worked for Bush. Why? Because he could count on the fact that the public’s paralytic, deer-in-the-headlights, FEAR of change, would negate the possibility of risking what would have been a wise choice in the election following 9/11. “Rather than remaking George W. Bush’s Republican party in his own image, Mr. McCain allowed the practitioners of the politics of fear and division to run the show”(9/5 NYT). It’s no coincidence that the White House spin of late has had to do with the dangers of forgetting the war on terror. The media, ever compliant with supporting the ancien regime, widely disseminated the call that we remember 9/11.

And so it is the Times reports that, “Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush’s advisers inserted a provision in a recent proposal from the Bush administration that many Americans have forgotten that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.” In the midst of an election season, its language represents a political attempt to ratchet up the fear factor, and desperately try to salvage a foundering McCain candidacy. The irony here is that McCain is employing the “same Karl Rovian team Bush used to eliminate McCain’s candidacy in the 2000 primaries.” (9/5 NY)

Regarding the fascist dramaturgy that framed McCain’s acceptance speech, I guess we can count on him to help those students at Walter Reed High School in Los Angeles, (oops! his handlers need a new google-image stooge), because he surely hasn’t helped the veterans (note the soldier-protestor at this cult gathering) who were three thousand miles away at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. And while his handlers proffered a larger than life feature on a heroic soldier who threw himself on two hand grenades in saving his comrades, they must have rued the fact they were unable to cash in on what might have been a star spangled feature on Pat Tillman. And well they could have, if the truth had never come out about the real Pat Tillman story.

According to his mother, Mary Tillman, in her new book, “Boots On The Ground By Dusk,” (2008), “The Army used him. They knew right away he was killed by fratricide [She refuses to use the phrase ‘friendly fire’] and they used him for their own purposes to promote the war, to get sympathy for the war, for five weeks.” Regarding the myth of Pat Tillman, the gung-ho, these-colors-don’t-run, warrior zealot? It simply wasn’t true. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, there was “A side of Pat Tillman not widely known—a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought, and died in service to his country yet was critical of president Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books…to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.”

Nor is it a probable coincidence I’ve received multiple e-mails of graphic 9/11 color photos, focused mainly on mid-air jumpers and exploding jet fuel. McCain’s war record is really an implied reminder that only a warrior president can protect us from the perpetrators of evil responsible for the events depicted in these gruesome images. Assuming this is true, and that McCain knows the grim complexities of militaristic policy decisions, consider the consequences should his potential vice-president be left to manage the contingencies of waging war. Governor Sarah Palin’s carefully thought out position on America’s investment of over four thousand American dead in Iraq is this: “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God, that’s what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” On this view, if the American invasion of Iraq was poorly planned, it must have been due to a lack of communication between Bush and God. What we really need is a candidate who can channel God’s will.

“Mr. McCain says he is the candidate who will better protect the country from terrorism. But about all he has to offer is his pledge to continue the war in Iraq. We have yet to hear an explanation for how he plans to do that while also salvaging the war in Afghanistan—the real front line in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban”(9/4 NYT) And what about this “real” front line? Given that page 8 of today’s New York Times reports that “A missile strike from a pilotless United States reconnaissance aircraft killed 6 to 12 people in a group of houses in southern Afghanistan, very close to the border with Pakistan….among the dead were two women and three children,” it’s not surprising that their lead editorial, “Caught in the Cross-Fire” warns that, “Civilians in Afghanistan are paying a deadly price in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. America is fast losing the battles for hearts and minds.”

So forget winning hearts and minds, let’s play the FEAR card again. Trouble is, you can always count on America’s short memory. As no less than our venerable Attorney General, Michael Mukasey told House lawmakers in July, “As Sept. 11, 2001, recedes into the past, there are some people who have come to think of it as kind of a singular event and of there being nothing else out there.” But never fear, the reason we forget has to do with the wonderful job the Bush administration has done in protecting us: “In a way, we are the victims of our own success, our own success being that another attack has been prevented.” Never mind that 9/11 might never have happened had the present administration heeded the warnings by a number of government agencies that an attack was imminent.

McCain’s war hero montage may have stoked a few patriotic hearts, but the only New-York-state-of-mind most viewers were in concerned the Giants and Redskins. Besides, if being a soldier is the only qualification one needs for the highest office, then why weren’t Audie Murphy, or Ira Hayes ever elected? Moreover, films like Platoon and Heartbreak Ridge are passé. Most of the public, apart from the yawning old white men we’re being asked to trust, are more interested in Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express. McCain’s hackneyed charge that Obama’s party is a “me first, country second” crowd out of touch with America’s deep seated patriotism is the illusion of a rich power elite insulated from the realities of everyday American life. To coin a phrase from the good-old-boy vernacular, that dog won’t hunt. The young, immigrant, and multicultural majority on the horizon are less interested in killing people or being killed than achieving social and economic justice.