Now there’s something you don’t see every day. That is, unless you’re one of those people who sees it every day. I’m just sayin’. (Oh no… I’ve become one of those people who says, “I’m just sayin’…”).

The thing I’m seeing (as opposed to the thing I’m sayin’) is this massive crack in the foundation of our beloved Hammer Mill. Never noticed it before, actually. Funny what you run across when you’re snooping around the place, looking for discarded foodstuffs (abandoned sandwiches, leftover fruit, etc.). Pretty soon you’re picking up on all of the stuff that’s been going on without your noticing it. I always thought that Mitch Macaphee’s experiments in plate tectonics might have some regrettable consequences. Now I can see that I was right. What has Mitch been working on, specifically? Funny you should ask. It’s this thing he picked up on in one of Matt’s songs, a little number called “Why Not Call It George?” The chorus goes like this:

Continental drift can be reversed
Great tumblers shift
And Pangaea can be reclaimed
After me it can be renamed
Why not call it George?
Call it George after me.

Now, I would be the first to caution people against taking song lyrics seriously. After all, look what happened with that Manson thing - and all because he was reading too much into Tommy James and the Shondells’ Crimson and Clover. (You know… “Crimson” - blood! “Clover” - on the graves of the dead! “Over and over” - MANY dead!) Well, Mitch has gone and done it again, trying to recreate the mother of all continents through some strange electromagnetic process that only HE understands. Hard to believe he is the inventor of something as, well, intellectually challenged as Marvin (my personal robot assistant). (Don’t tell Marvin I said that. Just attribute it to someone else, please - he’s very sensitive lately.)

Well, aside from scrounging and discovering mysterious faults to the center of the Earth, we’ve been working on a few songs… actually a sackload of songs. Not doing the lounge lizard thing any more. No sir, the next time we perform, it will be our own ridiculous tunes, not someone else’s. And we will have a powerpoint presentation handy to explain each one, so no one makes the mistake of misinterpreting them like Manson did with “Crimson and Clover” or whatever the hell song. Matt and I have been working furiously on this project, now that we know the potentially disastrous consequences that may result from mere un-footnoted performances. What the hell - we played “Why Not Call It George,” and now the Earth may be destroyed. Who knew?

So, all you would-be failed indie rock musicians out there - be careful what you sing! You may end up in SING SING! I’m just…. stoppin’.

Just a few short takes on what’s happening on planet Earth this week. Got a lot of things going on, as it happens - no excuses. Anyway… here’s what’s bugging the hell out of me.

Haiti. The story is starting to get old, I can see, even though many are still waiting for help, not getting enough food, can’t find a doctor, etc. A large part of the problem is our obsession with security. I’m afraid we’ve been an occupying power for a few too many years; it has had its effect, just as it has on the Israeli Defense Forces. We take a military approach to everything, and we trust no one. The U.N., for the most part, is in the same boat, driving around in secure vehicles even before the earthquake hit. Combine this with the general decay of our emergency management capabilities over the past decade and it’s not hard to understand why even with a significant commitment of resources, people in Haiti have been waiting a long time for a helping hand.

For chrissake - over the past two weeks, I’ve been listening to NPR correspondents blandly reporting how the markets in Port Au Prince are full of food but most people cannot afford to buy it, while relief agencies are struggling to efficiently distribute food and water. And I’m practically screaming at my radio, W.T.F. - THE FOOD IS ALREADY THERE! JUST PAY FOR IT! Take some of the freaking money you’ve pledged to this problem and stuff it in the pockets of these food vendors so that they will GIVE THE NEEDY SOMETHING TO EAT! If anyone out there can tell me why this can’t happen, I’d love to hear about it.  (In any case, please consider supporting Partners in Health - they are not afraid to do what needs to be done, and that’s the kind of help Haiti needs.)

Af-Pakistan. I suppose there’s no point in denying that we are actively engaged in battle in Pakistan, right? Three dead American soldiers tie a firm knot on that one. How many time are we going to kill the “Top Taliban Leader” or “#3 Al Qaeda Leader” by remote control before we realize that these guys are almost always replaced by someone younger and more militant, and that the human cost in terms of civilians killed and wounded in these operations generates many more recruits than can ever be discouraged by martyring militant leaders?  

And another thing. Witness, if you haven’t already, South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer’s comments about poor people, equating them with “stray animals” who should not be fed because “they breed” and “you’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply.” Leonard Pitts Jr. deconstructed this better than I ever could. All I can say is that, if they’re going to replace Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford with this tool, old South Carolina will only be trading the blind for the stupid.

That’s all I’ve got.

luv u,

jp

That one was mine. Oh yes, absolutely it was. It had that black spot on the left side. No, no… the left-hand side, as one looks at it. Bloody mongoose!

Oh, hi. You caught me haggling over the incalculable bounty of a bunch of bananas. Somehow, twenty years ago, I never pictured myself spending any serious time trying to convince a rogue mongoose that a twice-discarded piece of fruit belonged to me, not him. (I had no vision, no foresight.) And yet here I am, on the cobblestone street outside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, engaged in this literally fruitless enterprise. No, my friends, I am not hungry. We of Big Green are not wanting for sustenance. We have our art to feed us, our music to fill our bellies, our powerpoint slides to use as sandwich slices, our amplifier heads to employ as toaster ovens, our… our… man, I’m hungry! 

All right, to be honest… it is lunchtime at the Mill. (The whistle just blew - crazy thing still works even though there hasn’t been a shift on duty here in probably 50 years.) It’s a Pavlovian response for me. Still, I don’t want the banana for snacks. We are working on concepts for the next Big Green album, and one of the many, many useless ideas involves bananas. (Only one? you may ask.) Not sure - I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have come up with that one. Hire an old phonograph somewhere, he says. Get a banana, he says. Put the banana on the phonograph turntable, he says. So what do I do? I go and listen to him, that’s what. Who’s the fool here, eh? The fool robot or the fool who listens to him? Oh, well. We grab ideas wherever we can find them.

Not that the bananas wouldn’t come in handy anyway. All that stuff about spiritual/artistic food? In truth, it’s not very satisfying. And bananas are better than what I can usually wrestle away from the local mongooses. (Mongeese?) Typically that’s a breadfruit rind or coconut shells. I mean, if I’m going to have a spartan dinner, I would prefer it not be something that has to be eaten with vise-grips. Hard times indeed. We’ve been trying to put our meager minds together on how to yank ourselves out of this pit of poverty and obscurity. (Leave us face it - we have a following like the fictional band played by Flight of the Conchords.) I don’t know. Hootenannies? Open rehearsals? Slide shows? Bake sales? 

That’s the thing - so many ideas, so little time.

I have to think that President Obama really wants to be remembered as one of the great presidents, like FDR or Lincoln. (Don’t say Reagan, because that would just be silly.) I just don’t know if he thinks big enough. But whatever his motivations or limitations may be, we simply cannot allow ourselves to be confined by them. What America needs is a healthy dose of movement politics - the kind that brought us the five day work week, earned black people the vote, and brought the Vietnam war to an end. It’s the only way fundamental change happens, and we had best start facing that fact.

That is something the late great Howard Zinn understood. (Very sorry to hear of his passing this week.) And it’s something that gets repeated frequently in these strange days when the closest thing we have to a national progressive party behaves like a timid opposition even while it enjoys the largest majorities it has seen in Congress since the Watergate era. One can, with some justification, fault Obama with being too conciliatory, to modest in his ambitions, too willing to reach out to the other side (particularly in the knowledge that they will be satisfied only with his - and our - complete failure). But Congressional Democrats, by and large, are perhaps the most timid creatures ever to cast a shadow. Sure, there are the Graysons, the Kucinichs, the Sanders (and by each of these I really mean there is only one), but the main body of the caucus in either house is completely cowed by the opposition.

Whether or not Obama is serious about making positive change, he should understand one thing: the Republican party, particularly those in Congress, will not support him no matter what he does. He could adopt all of their positions (instead of just many of them) and they will still work to destroy him politically. That is their clear objective, whatever noises they make for the cameras and microphones. From a political standpoint, I don’t blame Obama for addressing the G.O.P. retreat this week and taking their questions. I think he should call them out, and we did see a little bit of that today. But if he seriously thinks that they are going to work with him on anything substantive, he is smoking crack. He would be well-advised to start appealing to his base, a.k.a. the people who got him elected, and use his considerable rhetorical gifts to articulate a more progressive vision of governance.

Of course, he won’t… unless we really push him. Now would be a good time to start, folks.

luv u,

jp

Watch me now - Work, work! (Aw, shake it up, baby!) Work, work! (Yeah, you drive me crazy!) Work, work! (Got a little bit of soul, now!)

Yeah, that’s me… and yes, I’m doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the “Mashed Potato”, so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I’m being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again - I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they’ve been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now - if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you’ve never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That’s probably all I need to tell you about that. (INCOMING!)

This is the kind of place we try to stay out of, frankly. Not real hot on original numbers. The patrons prefer early 60s rock and rockabilly, and if you don’t give it to them, best be on your way. Hey - you’ve got to scrape a few semolians together somehow, right? And these days, between Big Green interstellar (or even terrestrial) tours, I’ll take what I can get. Can you blame me? I’m tired of eating out of discarded pizza boxes and running my finger around the inside of empty soup cans. No more fighting the mongooses for bits of breadfruit (those bits that they don’t want) or pulling the bark off of baobab trees to see if there are any tender grubs to be had. (Not that I would EAT them, you understand. No, no… I train them to hunt for vegetables. Painstaking work.)

You should know that I am not the only one resorting to extreme measure to make ends meet in these hard, hard times. We’re all finding ways to make a little extra on the side. Matt, for instance, is giving bird and wildlife tours. How can he stand all those grandmothers and boy scouts,  you ask? Well…. he doesn’t run into any. The fact is, he’s bringing wild birds and animals around on tours, showing them the local points of interest. They can’t pay very much, it’s true - a desiccated pine cone is all he made yesterday - but it’s a job, and someone has to do it. The two Lincolns are doing a mutt and jeff routine down in the village square in hopes of garnering a few tips. So far, no luck… though some passers-by have offered unsolicited advice to the two… valuable tips like “Get a life!” and “Where did you losers come from?” and, of course, “Come back here! You’re supposed to pay for those kaiser rolls!” (I get that last one a lot.)

The only guy around here who doesn’t worry about making money is Mitch. He makes as much as he needs. Though his fives are not nearly as well-rendered as his tens and twenties. (Work on the ink a bit there, boy.)

There’s a lot that can be said about the Senatorial special election in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, and I’m not going to say very much of it. (You’ve probably heard most of the political post-mortems already.) Looks to me like the good people of our neighboring commonwealth have seen fit to hand Ted Kennedy’s old seat to Mitt Romney 2.0, a slight upgrade from the original model (this one, at least, confirmably anatomically correct). As far as his political positions are concerned, it’s a mixed bag - a little angry anti-bank populism (People are mad, damn it, and so am I!), a little love for waterboarding, some tin-foil hat-ism, and the usual measure of running away from his most inflammatory comments, like passively questioning president Obama’s origin as the son of two legally married individuals. (Smooth.) There’s also the listing from political side to political side as needed, like voting in favor of Mitt Romney’s statewide health insurance system in Massachusetts, but opposing the national version.  He should blend in nicely with the G.O.P. caucus, though poor Jim DeMint will have to forfeit his crown as the party’s Senatorial winged Adonis. (Sad. Very sad.)

Indeed, his greatest political impact may indeed be the effect his election is having on the Democrats, who have been rending their garments, flagellating themselves, etc., ever since last Tuesday. One gets the impression by listening to heavyweights like Bart Stupak and Evan Bayh that their strategy moving forward will be something like stand quietly at the back of the chamber and hope their constituents will elect them by default. Even my own home district Congressman Mike Arcuri is sounding a little timorous, perhaps because the Republican fool who nearly unseated him in 2008 has announced his intention to try again this year (a mere day after Brown’s election) and local tea-party freak Don Jeror (a.k.a. Mr. “You are LYING to me!”) has said he is looking for a conservative Democrat to challenge Arcuri in the primary. (Jeror has been making the error of using modern human language in his search for an electable caveman. He should use grunts. Try it, man!)

Tin-foil hats aside, I’m beginning to think the hyper-conservatives have been right about the Democrats all along: bloody hell, they ARE surrender monkeys! In all seriousness, I think this has just given them the excuse to openly channel their inner Republican (to the extent that they haven’t been doing it up to now). Of course, with this week’s Supreme Court decision removing any restrictions on the flow of corporate cash into political advertising, any Democrats who maintain a less-than-congenial relationship with Exxon-Mobil, Google, Cargill, or any other firm with deep pockets will likely find their districts flooded with attack ads, paid shills, and every kind of legal sabotage money can buy.  Yes, folks - George W. Bush and his reactionary predecessors are truly the gift that keeps on giving. The 5-4 decision to sell our electoral process to the highest bidder was advanced by two Reagan appointees, one Bush I appointee, and (crucially) two Bush II appointees. Is it too late to say, we should have kept W out of the White House?

I am afraid it may be too late. Score one for the corporatists. We’ll need to work on how best to fight this.

luv u,

jp

Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. What can I tell you? You’ve got to roll with the … hey…. put the gun down. Put it DOWN!

Oh, hi. No worries, my friends, no worries. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have a trigger finger, but it’s not supple enough to squeeze off anything like an accurate shot. Sometimes he gets worked up enough to wave that old revolver our militant former neighbor Gung-Ho left lying around the mill so many years back. (He dropped it in mid-stride during some imagined emergency, if I recall correctly. It was his side-arm, and he was firing his principal weapon randomly at the time. Those were the days!) I know, I know… I shouldn’t lecture my mechanical companion, but sometimes it’s hard to resist. The fucker gets so disappointed sometimes, you’d think he was, well… human, or something capable of even greater whiny-ness. I guess attendance at his opening night performance of the Wizard of Oz (in three acts) was less than expected. In fact, I think the only people there were some of the school’s nighttime janitorial staff and some of our local downtowners who were trying to get in out of the cold. (Poor tin man.)

Can’t believe this is his first taste of rejection! What a sheltered life these automatons lead. Even root vegetables like the man-sized tuber have experienced the dusty flavor of defeat. (Or perhaps that is just dirt from the garden from which he was plucked.) Yes, his fortunes have turned since his salad days, if you will, but tubey’s life has been far from a bed of roses prior his election to the local municipal mayoralty. (We bear some responsibility for that, of course. Yet another mea culpa. I’m thinking of changing our band’s name to mea culpa. What do you think? Hmmmmm?) And we human members of the Big Green complement have taken a few lumps over the years. Hell, just look at the two Lincolns. Are you looking? Well, if you are, then you know… they look like HELL. Just like it, I tell you! But I digress…

Of course, Marvin is a machine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But let us face it, his problems should not be thought of as permanent. Why, with the right kind of attention and the requisite skills, his disappointment may be programmed away and replaced with joy. A talented machinist could give him an extra arm with the power to throw a javelin at escape velocity so that it sails through deep space and pierces the moon (or “the” Mars). His inventor Mitch Macaphee could power him down and set him on a nuclear timer of some kind so that he would restart in 1,000 or even 10,000 years - he would know the future! (Lord knows, he has already seen the past. As have we all….. right?) The sad fact is, though, that Mitch could have saved him even this childish disappointment he has encountered of late. He could have given Marvin a new set of pipes, or more terpsichorean robot legs, so that his Wizard of Oz (in three acts) performance would have brought the house down and dragged audiences in from distant cities and even the microscopic hillside hamlets that dot our countryside.

Well, is that the time? Got to get back to my Mexican stand-off. All right, Marvin…. you’ve had your fun. Step away from the revolver.

What can one say about the misery, the sheer horror, of what is happening in Haiti right now? It is as if the planet itself has seen fit to kick them in the teeth when they were down. I don’t want to write even five more words before encouraging anyone who reads this blog to donate to relief efforts in any way you see fit. (My personal recommendation would be to support Partners in Health, but choose whichever means you prefer.)

Aside from the devastation and massive human suffering, the most impressive element of this catastrophe is the hypocrisy demonstrated by people in the United States who have been primarily responsible for the immiseration of Haitians over the past few decades. President Obama is correct when he describes how Haiti is ”tied” to the United States historically, but he might more accurately have used the term “chained” - a sickening litany of occupation, subjugation, and sabotage that stretches back to the dawn of that nation’s independence. Just to focus on the most recent phase of this ugly relationship, it is important to remember that the Bush I administration supported the 1991 coup that ousted Haiti’s first popularly-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and ushered in a reign of terror marked by unspeakable brutality on the part of the Junta and paramilitary organizations like FRAP.

While Clinton is credited with returning Aristide to power, his administration turned a blind eye to fuel shipments to the coup regime of Raoul Cedras while insisting that Aristide return under conditions that would result in deeper penury for the Haitian people. That was a bitter pill for the Haitian people, who had taken great risks in very dark times to organize the Lavalas political movement that brought Aristide to the presidency in the first place, and subsequently paid a high price at the hands of the U.S.-sanctioned coup regime.

Ten years later, after Aristide had returned to power and had begun steering Haiti away from the neoliberal model that had been strangling it for decades, the Bush administration supported yet another coup, staged in part from the Dominican Republic, that brought a kleptocratic business-based elite back to power which, once again, looted the nation and persecuted Aristide supporters. More help from Uncle Sam. With a severely weakened government, by 2008 there were food riots, and now Haitians live on something like $2 a day.

It sickens me to see the crocodile tears of politicians in this country over the misery that they helped make possible. An even greater nausea comes over me at the thought of W. Bush and Clinton coordinating relief efforts.  But, for the nonce, we can only try to help as best we can, by supporting those groups who will help Haitians not only recover but build their social institutions back up again.

luv u,

jp

I think that planter goes over here. No, no… not there. Just behind the divider, where no one can see it. That’s right - perfect. Now… where to place the emerald city?

Yes, friends… this is Hammermill Days, the blog chronicling Big Green’s bizarre existence. You haven’t stumbled onto some daycare center message board. I’m just doing a little compassionate backfill for one of our number who does not respond well to his responsibilities. I’m speaking of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who cannot take it upon himself to devote a few stray hours to the upbringing of his invention, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Oh, the trials of surrogate fatherhood! Now I’m left with filling in for an absentee mad scientist. This is awful - I’ve forgotten all the rituals, the nostrums, the pat-on-the-head kind of shit. And, well… Marvin is so damn needy.  Something in his programming, I think. He craves approval almost as much as he needs 3-in-1 oil. In spite of this, I made the mistake of recommending an amateur theatrical debut for our mechanical friend. (I’m not good.) 

Okay, so… Marvin is going to be in the local school production of the Wizard of Oz (in three acts); he’s appearing as the tin man, of course (no costume needed), and he’s freaking scared to death. Why? I don’t know. Stage fright. Some kind of computer virus. What am I, psychic? I told you, I’m no good at this parent or guardian thing. I can’t even keep track of my pet rock, let alone a full-grown robot. Sweet mother of pearl, why can’t Mitch take some responsibility? He’s just obsessed with his work, that’s why. And that’s enough to scare the paint off the walls, quite frankly. I’ve told you about the anti gravity experiments. That’s small potatoes, friend, very small. Listen… you didn’t hear it from me, but old Mitch has been working his bony fingers to the marrow cooking up this global warming phenomenon everyone is talking about. I suppose you thought it was the result of tailpipe emissions and coal-fired power plants, eh? Well…. think again.

Mitch started getting interested in climate change a few years back. Think of this as a kind of mea culpa, actually. You see, we threw together a little number we call “The Dino Song”, which goes a bit like this:

Dinos had a good time on the trolley!
Dinos had a good day at the fair!
Dinos had a holiday ’til the sky turned mean and gray
Their underbellies went a-gushing jelly and they died in searing pain!

That jolly little number became a particular favorite of Mitch’s, not because of its musical or poetic merits (or lack of same) but because of the subject matter. Hmmmmm, he thought (yes, he sometime generates visible thought bubbles), If the sky turned mean and gray then, why not now? Which was followed by an utterance along the lines of BWAA-HA-HA-HA-HA!! … which I believe is the Pashto term for “this is good.” Anyway, that’s when he got to work.

Hey… sometimes a man can’t be a good parent because he expends all his goodness elsewhere. In Mitch’s case, it’s a little different. So that last observation, well… just forget it.

President Obama has announced that the “buck” stops with him when things go wrong within the elaborate intelligence apparatus that supports airport security and anti-terrorism in general. But what about with respect to another type of terrorism - the kind we perpetrate on others? Is he willing to accept that “buck” as well? His predecessor certainly wasn’t. Like under Bush II, civilians have been the target of our military in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and, indirectly, elsewhere. According to the U.N., more than 2,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the first ten months of 2009, about 450 of which are attributable to the U.S. and our allies. That number is probably low, since in every conflict the line is deliberately blurred between combatants and non-combatants, but even if we accept it at face value, 450 deaths represents a lot of suffering, disaffection, and anger. I’m not sure how it is any different to kill hundreds of peasants with unmanned drones than it is to blow up buses or passenger airliners - both are indiscriminate, heinously destructive, and criminal. Both shield the true perpetrators. And both seek to advance a political cause through faceless violence. Will Obama take responsibility for that?

It is hard to see how we as a society will ever get beyond our eagerness to resort to killing as a preferred means of foreign policy. Let’s face it - its advocacy is a great way to drum up votes if you’re a tin-pot politician. Has any national leader since Barry Goldwater sacrificed an election simply on the basis of being too much of a hawk? It has an amazingly broad appeal. I can’t tell you how many times otherwise smart people have suggested, nominally in jest, that we drop bombs on this country or that. There’s a cathartic simplicity to it. And since most Americans are blissfully unaware of the degree to which their government has meddled in the affairs of other peoples, opting for military action seems to many an appropriate response in the face of an irrationally hostile world. Why do those people hate us? we’re always asking ourselves. What the hell did we ever do to them? It is as if we are born anew each moment, perpetually free of our dark past and our equally troubling present.

Obama’s administration is, like many of its predecessors, propelled forward into bad policy by the criticisms of some very cynical voices, including some who were primarily responsible for the catastrophic failures of the last regime. It occurs to me that one of the more common Cheneyisms - that we are less safe from attack under Obama - may, in a sense, be grimly true. Cheney, Bush, and his crew nearly destroyed the U.S. empire. They led us into two disastrous wars that drained us of blood, treasure, and international credibility, to say nothing of the death and damage they dealt to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their idiocy at governing knew no bounds, as the destruction of New Orleans and the implosion of our economy amply demonstrated. This is well-known to the leaders of Al Qaeda, I’m certain, just as I’m sure they are aware that terror attacks (and attempted attacks) redound to the political benefit of people like Bush and Cheney. Ergo, if they attack us, they know we are likely to turn around and elect people who will surely bring this country down, and its empire with it.

Simple strategy - let your enemy destroy him/herself. Al Qaeda appears to know that one. Do we?

luv u,

jp