errata race

the editor regrets:

due to an inebriation error, our report that dick cheney as a child played puck in "a midsummer night's surge" was not correct. mickey rooney played puck. mr. cheney performed in "krapp's last tape" at the east berlin annual proctologist's convention. we regret the error.

our editorial describing first lady laura bush's hairdo as "wookie-like" was inexact. the editorialist has corrected the phrase to "a festival of furbies."

the odessa correspondent's note that the pentagon's new war czar is a hemophiliac descendant of russia's romanov family is, alas, off the mark. he is instead the great great great grand nephew of kaiser wilhelm ii, and enjoys two fully functioning arms. he does not wear a mustache.

a klonipin-addled photo intern transposed pictures and captions in sunday's "celebs on toast" section. german chancellor andrea merkel hasn't, to our knowledge, ever "jiggled her headlights," and is not in danger of incarceration in california; ms. hilton did not refer to vladimir putin as a "pissant slavic putz."

due to a typesetter's miscue, the headline on page 12, in reference to former massachusetts governor romney's quest for the white house, should read "mormon's heir" rather than "moron's hair."

we regret to inform readers that secretary of state condoleeza rice was never a member of the supremes. she merely shares their aging hairdresser. doctor rice is, however, a pianist of honkytonk quality. she mainly performs privately for her livingroom full of exercise machines.

in a profile of her royal majesty queen elizabeth ii entitled "saxon's angle," please substitute "regal bearing" for the incorrect "fecal sharing." in addition, tony blair is not the author of the 1948 novel "1984."

a description of senate minority leader mitch mcconnell's neckwear as "castro faggot-ass pink" occured due to a brownout that discombobulated our aging linotype equipment. we publicly apologize to the castro district of the city of san francisco.

next week: toenail clipping our footnotes.

lonelygrunt15

at ease, gentlemen.

i hear you all bitchin bout our new rules about them intertubes. lemme lay it out for you. defective immediately, keep your asses off of myspace, youtube, xtube, flickr, dickr, and any other libral shitass wangwave video crap web thing.

and especially stay off dudesnude. i know you guys say you love each other but do you hafta deep kiss? and don't tell me the brits are doin it. this ain't amsterdam or frisco.

and another thing. stop talkin to them writers. don't let me catch you in bed with some embedded journalist. a pen's as dangerous as a bomb.

now i know you been hearin about g.i.'s returnin home and bein denied medical and disability cause the docs fake up some "pre-existing" mental condition b.s. look, you volunteered for this here army. that's crazy from the getgo, so we already got you on a technicality.

i don't gotta remind you to be super careful out there. this place ain't no shopping mall. well, cept for mccain. baghdad is damn dangerous. reminds me of detroit. with crappier cars. crappier cars that explode.

so help me, if one a you guys gets blowed up by any ied, i'll personally strangle whatever's left of you.

hey, you in back there - put down that goddamn noam chomsky book and pay attention.

president brushcut's got his fubar surge thing goin, and we're the lucky bunnies what got to carry it out. extreme awareness is the rule. avoid any bigass trucks with posters of ben loadin on em. remain super cautious while searching or patting down civilians or suspects.

and that reminds me of another thing. no, repeat no, fraternizin with them muslim girls. you stay outta their sunni triangles. and don't be callin in air strikes on no more nail salons.

hey, and don't think i didn't see you friggin sad sacks scratching your eyebrows with your middle fingers the goddamn whole time dick cheney gave his speech here. you can thank jesus the v.p. is fuckin nearsighted. and i don't want any mass crotch scratching next week when condi visits.

men, we got a important mission here. just cause they won't fuckin tell us what the fuck it is don't mean we ain't gonna go out and accomplish the goddamn mission. ya follow me on this?

let's go out and and kick ass and win some hearts and minds.

cause if you fuck this up, boys, there's a moldy rat room waitin for you at walter reed.

oh, cookie wants me to remind you that tonight's special is chipped beef on toast.

that's it.

disfugginsmissed.

cost of life

in my city salad days (more my bacobits days), i paid a third of our $125 a month rent, drank 35 cent pickwick ales, enjoyed 99 cent lunches, and drove cab at night. my college tuition had been $200 a semester. work all summer; save enough for a university year. bob dole was running for vice president.

students, let us compare and contrast.

now: average equivalent urban rent - $1,750.
beer: five bucks a pop.
state school: $8,000 per semester.

the iraq war will easily cost 1.25 trillion dollars. that's billions of months of rent at my 1976 rate.

the gray lady reports last week that the average manhattan hedge fund manager's take last year topped $350 million.

the average.

a subway ride away, the bronx remains the poorest urban county in america. throughout gotham 1.5 million live below the poverty level. a poverty level that is set insultingly low. hundreds upon hundreds of thousands receive food stamps. hundreds of thousands more need them.

this fiscal straight jacket tightens with crushing inevitability, a python. day after day, dime by dime, hunger to hunger, the empire of money crushes human futures.

over a single generation we've slid from pride to penury.

what's a life worth?

andrew bacevich found out. bacevich is from a military family, fought in vietnam. he is a professor at boston university. his twenty seven year old son, also named andrew, volunteered to fight in iraq. professor bacevich has consistently written against the iraq war.

last week professor bacevich received the news no parent should receive. his son had been killed.

professor bacevich writes, "memorial day orators will say that a g.i.'s life is priceless. don't believe it. i know what value the u.s. government assigns to a soldier's life: i've been handed the check. it's roughly what the yankees will pay roger clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month."

let's talk about [blank]

michaelangelo's david was fitted with a figleaf. barbarians thwacked the dicks off classic greek statues. the japanese pixillate out cocks in their porn. satyr vases hide in museum basements.

why this long panic about guy's weenies?

this vital fluid erectory device is getting short shrift. we have two states and two contrasting acceptabilities. state 1: soft, almost ok. state 2: hard, usually obscene.

the lads in plato's time had a dual course too. 1: public sculpture with miniturized genitals (schlongettes?). 2: beasty satyrs with humongous hardons.

along with our double brains we have double attitudes. eros is so powerful and unpredictable we've split this force into sappy puppy love versus bull-savage uncontainment. we lurch between radical extremes.

what about a civil conversation between the two? a confluence. a meeting in geneva, as it were. first negotiations might be tense.

artists can help us out here. creators tussle with contraries, like jacob wrestling the angel. consider the rumbustious life and work of robert mapplethorpe. he roped a suppressed eros right back into the fine arts, hot and camera-ready. prudes were apoplectic. museums refused shows. southern senators fulminated. a curator was taken to court.

his art gave vision to the gay lib phrase 'the personal is political.' what shocked was unashamed pleasure of the flesh. and his crashing of racial barriers ('god ahmighty, there's black dick all over them museum walls.'). mapplethorpe's piece called "man in a polyester suit" raised delicious scandal. a knee to neck close up reveals a black man wearing a cheap suit, fly open, pendulous phallus on show.

there's more than a touch of humor to this work: "here's the forbidden thing. you'll have to change your life."

the satyr is freed from the cellar.

our commentarium

the web is now a huge commentarium that's spread faster than radio, television, or herpes. it is infostuffed, goofy, raging, lewd. strangely, we have the pentagon to thank for getting it going. it subsumes media that came before - print, music, photos, ads, art, design, video.

just this week i've watched monica goodgirl's evasions, japanese porn, bill moyer's journal, al gore on jon stewart, and more more more. i've read reports, articles, comments, prose frothings. i saw the pres shit on by a bird. and, always, the ads, hogging as much space as they can.

untethered to time, i've absorbed this digital dog's breakfast naked in bed curled up with a laptop. all this is, admittedly, far from listening to socrates at the agora.

but this pixel festival is here to stay.

nicholas negroponte is ushering in a one hundred dollar laptop to be bought by governments and donated to children in poorer countries. he talks of making laptops by the tens of millions, by the hundreds of millions.

bucky fuller in the 1960's proposed a 'world game,' in a large stadium wherein mainframe computers pumped data about the whole earth's resources onto large screens. all were invited to 'play' strategies to maximize success for the planet's citizens. then pick the best and enact it.

mainframe shrank to mini computer then into a laptop in every christmas stocking. decentralization decentered. we didn't get the world game (our business poobahs had other ideas). we got google, wikipedia, and lonelygirl.

so we come to blogs and bloggers. 'blogger' is such a plonky word (click 'comment' below and suggest better). a 'blogger' sounds like the roto rooter guy who comes with a fecal encrusted device to ream a septic tank with. note: don't end a sentence with with.

i started on the print trade in an age of hot wax and physical pasteups. i still miss that waxine aroma but type and post is a hell of a lot easier. let the cyber romp romp on.

it's an astonishment to remember that this whole ediface is built on sand. or, at least, on silicon.





.

is it on wikipedia yet?

empussification. a word coined by jon stewart on his faux news show. it refers to the dems backing off including timelines in an iraq war funding bill. the hint is that bush has empussified the congress.

the root word is of course 'pussy,' a slur on females, and, when used by one male against another, an insult.

we seem to be uncertain about sexual boundaries, confused about aggression. butch posturing is an old game played by men in politics. "he looks french" is the least of it. the daggers of speech by the three leading repub candidates presages a 2008 festival of bellicosity.

it's all about domination. from schoolyard insults and fighting to a reluctant empire attacking a far off country, it's about violently getting our way, about forcing submission.

i saw it in its most vicious form on cnn. a young woman from northern iraq had fallen in love with a young man from the wrong tribe, the wrong religion. male villagers dragged her into the street and kicked and stoned her to death. police officials watched and did nothing. someone recorded it on cell phone video.

can we still believe in the moral progress of the human race?

bird terror update

high military officials announced that the bird poop attack on president bush during an outdoor press conference is part of a "dangerous avian al quaida terrorist threat."

Department of homeland security czar michael cjerkoff stated "effective immediately, all birds are on the dhs no-fly list." the director further announced the appointment of tippi hedron as new head of the anti-avian terrorist task force. ms. hedron interrupted her face lift surgery and boarded a plane for washington.

Reports of navy gun boats shelling east coast bird sanctuaries could not be confirmed at this hour.

the aclu reported that an fbi raid on audubon society headquarters was underway. an fbi spokescretin said "any avian terrorist sympathizers will be met with the full power of the law."

senator byrd of west viginia was reportedly detained.

air force colonel walter pigeon commented: "if we see so much as a tweety bird on the wing, our pilots have orders to make broilers out of them suckers."

president commander guy issued this statement: "i tollya they were gonna strike at us at home again. why don't yall listen to me?"

police were seizing copies of an alfred hitchcock film they were not at liberty to name, claiming it is "an ortnitho-islamic fascist al quaida training film that could endanger national security."

al quaida of iraq denounced the administration's actions as "chicken shit."

forgettery

"the united states of amnesia" is what gore vidal calls our republic. we seem to be innoculated against our own history. the tsunami of media swamps our social and political perspective.

think of how infrequently one of our ubiquitous talking heads compares the mire of iraq with the quicksand of vietnam. are not the same overweening malign certainties bursting from the mouth of president birdshit as they did before from lyndon and milhouse? doesn't the bombast of rumsfeld remind you of the chill declarations of macnamara?

and the terrifying video vomiting from our televisions - aren't the similarities eerie? shouldn't we be doubly appalled?

we forget things on a personal level. name all your high school teachers. like me, you probably can't. you may remember you first kiss, but how about the twenty second or the thirty fourth. city life is a regimented series of ignorings, a survival round of sloughings. there is a logic to personal forgettings.

our societal forgettings are more dangerous and dangerously orchestrated. remember the twelve foot high cement wall being built around the adhimiya section of baghdad? seen any photos of it lately? you can think of a dozen more orwellian memory holes.

there was something else important i wanted to add but, dammit, i've forgotten.

_________________________________________________________
sometimes the perfect editorial comes out of the blue.

out in the white house rose garden, as our frat boy pres extolled the virtues of his amigo alberto g., a bird overhead, seizing the moment, dropped a load of shit on w's sleeve.

o brave angel, o winged avenger. this dead eye duck is my hero du jour.

so, by the lack of power vested in me, i hereby award hogwilde's first crapping truth to power award to this hero of the skies.

let this omen be a warning to president beshatted.

intro speckshun

i type in a small room at the y in a large american city.

i type badly in lower case to match my lower caste status. after a glorious may afternoon and a charming dinner with a friend i slump into depression in thought of my country. is this truly our land whose leaders rip another country apart like a chicken? our land whose leaders kidnap, confine, torture men of different language and skin tone? what mad zealotry has turned them into yeats' rough beasts?

the ferocious despair of the era the vietnam war returns. then as now we suffered a deluded chief executive pursuing a war of personal bile, a war to uphold his own ego, a war that savaged a far land, a war of slaughter, a war without goals, a war that rode month after month on its own blood trail, a war stripped of sense or human goals.

help me now, you friends out there - what are we to do?

i invite your words, your agitations, your sane responses.