Drang Nach Osten: In Search of Lebensraum in Iran

It's the silly season again, when politicians turn lightly to thoughts of conquest. With the elections over, Angry Blondie sat down with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, to talk about this year's current crop of invadable nations and what battles we can look forward to in the coming year.

AB: Welcome, Paul.

PW: Glad to be here, Blondie.


AB: Paul, you've taken some flak over the protracted fighting in Iraq. Would it be fair to say that after two years, the Coalition's massive military presence is finally making progress in imposing democracy on the various squabbling factions in a nation with a population the size of Delaware's?

PW: Excellent question and I'm glad you asked. Yes, we continue to make progress each month. There have been some bumps in the road, but we are very much on target. And remember that it took even Delaware several years to ratify the Constitution.

AB: Moving on, what's the deal with nukes in Iran? Hype, or red alert? One nuke or a dozen?

PW: Blondie, the situation there is much worse than what's being reported. I am privy to classified reports that suggest that not only does Iran have thermonuclear capability (fusion in addition to fission), but also missile technology that surpasses even our own. Iran not only has perfected MIRV (multiple targeted independent reentry vehicles) ballistic missiles, but also a stealth program that can evade even our tightest strategic defense technology.

AB: No shit?

PW: No shit. And this information is from a single reliable source.

AB: Well, what are our options?

PW: Very few. Diplomacy is obviously failing. Despite days of negotiations, the Iranians have failed to immediately disarm and in fact continue to insist on the right to self-defense in the face of peaceable overtures from the nonbelligerent state of Israel...

AB: ...which is also nuclear-armed?

PW: No, Blondie. The source who started that rumor is not reliable, and in fact has recently been re-jailed for this slander.

AB: So what's the solution? Some sort or region-wide peace initiative, or what?

PW: If peace were an option, we would have tried that already. Peace is obviously a flawed strategy, since it lasts only in the short-term. Our argument is that if we incrementally decrease the periods between wars, we can complete them sooner, with fewer troops, and in turn devote more resources to more creative weapons systems for the twenty-first century police state.

AB: Well, okay, I gotta ask this. How are the hotels in Tehran? Better than Baghdad's?

PW: Much better, Blondie. No liquor, unfortunately, but Tehran's accommodations are more on the level of, say, Macedonia's, and there would be no need for walled Green Zones. Iran's highway systems are in a good state of development, and the population is more homogeneous, which means a far less danger of the type of civil conflict that we experienced in, say, Clinton's invasion of Bosnia.

AB: What about Syria? Any possibilities there?

PW: Maybe, down the road. Right now, Syria is a fairly impoverished country with few resources, such as petroleum, which means that any invasion there would not be immediately cost-effective. But Syria has been tossed around as a possibility in the next season.

AB: Great. Let me know when boots are about to hit the ground. Any hopes that I can be embedded?

PW: Cats are always welcome in our reporter pool.

Well, there you have it--this season's military prospects, straight from the distinguished and congenial Paul Wolfowitz. Check back often as we follow up on what promises to be an exciting military season.

Dick Cheney On The Street Of Broken Dreams

I am an honest man, straight, no chaser. I know that the common public perception of me is that of a square, but I am really a man of complex currents of emotion. I keep them buried, for the good of the nation.

I am a man of music and poetry who is also a prisoner of his own office and Mount Rushmore responsibility. On dusky summer nights the music calls me as the walls press closer, gripping me like an accordion in Lawrence Welk's television band. I think of Bonnie, who I knew in Nebraska, how her auburn locks cascaded past her bosom. Summer nights remind me of her. Bonnie is dead now, I think. The music stops, and I want a cigarette.

Down from my mansion is a hidden street that's often rain-soaked and trampled by the shoes of countless welfare recipients. It is on nights like this that I walk there, in search of... in search of my past? I don't know. Hell. I'm not a philosopher.

The rain has stopped, and a sort of fog rises up to the streetlamps. I walk a bit further tonight, until I hear a jazz trio echoing down an alley. It sounds like the music that I heard in the Negro juke joints of Lincoln. I never went to those places, but some of my friends did.

Regrets. Would I be Vice President if I had, just once, stepped into one of those places? My enemies would have known. It's a tossup. The fact is, I never went to those places, and now I have the weight of the Western world on me. If I had just once, slipped, yielded, Saddam would still be in Baghdad right now, and Osama would probably be dead.

I can't dwell on the past. My cigarette smoke trails past me. (Note to self: Wash my hands so that Lynne doesn't smell it.) I step inside the dive that lured me with the music. The place is filthy, dark. Greasy dollar bills are taped on the mirror behind the bar. Nice touch. The music almost drowns my thoughts, but it's also strangely exhilarating. I haven't been in a bar since, since... I can't remember. I haven't been free my whole goddam life.

I sit down at the bar. I'm wearing the jogging suit that I bought twenty years ago, and it's a bit tight. No one recognizes me. Good....

The bartender raises his eyebrows in a silent query, and I whisper, "Scotch." My doctor would have a heart attack if he knew what I was doing. The thought strikes me as funny. My doctor having a heart attack. And then I think--Why not? Life is meant to be fun, and funny. To hell with the doctor.

At the end of the bar, a woman is making eyes at me. We exchange glances, strangers in the night. She reminds me of Bonnie, only her hair is straighter and her makeup is, quite frankly, vulgar. But that's okay. I'm open-minded.

She moves over. "What's your name?" she asks. I'm perplexed. No one has ever asked me for my name. I look at her quizzically, and then mumble, "Richard." We make small-talk at first, as I order a second scotch.

There's something hypnotic in her eyes, and after a while I am practically reading her mind without hearing her words. I feel a nostalgic stirring from within me. I feel the armor of my Vice-Commander-In-Chief falling away. This woman makes me feel like a human being. A real man.

As she taps a finger on my hand, she asks me if I'm married, and then interjects, "It's okay if you are." I remember Ralph Reed saying something about being married to God, and I mutter, "Yeah, but it's okay." We smile.

We talked, and we talked. She was wearing some sort of sleeveless thing, and she looked... so... good. The music, the drinks... I trace the contours of her face with my eyes, notice the shadows cast by her long locks. I feel like I'm in a '40s movie, sepiatoned, but she is a voodoo woman. Satanic.

(to be continued)

Back To The Future With Ol' Blue Eyes: American Idiot

Yep, kids, it's me again, like a bad penny. Are you scared yet? No? Well, Frankie has been doing some reading lately. There are some good books out there on me. I liked the one that Tina did. Pretty good. I always told my kids, "Say whatever you want--just tell the truth." A lot of people out there would benefit from that advice. Oh, they get the facts right, like the songs I sang when I was with Dorsey, but they sugar-coat it. I never realized that once they plant you in the ground, they treat you like a goddam saint, like playing "It Was A Very Good Year" over and over on the radio. People forget that I was the original badass. I used to tell my friends, "If someone makes you mad, I'll knock them off for you." I was joking, and they'd laugh, but they never really, really knew if it was true. That's the essence of punk. All of your pseudo-punks out there dress up in makeup and wear wigs and couldn't play their way out of a piss-soaked bag. No talent. Punk isn't dress; it's not even image. It's attitude. You wear it; you share it. And you won't have to take shit off of anyone again.

Are We Not Men? No! We Are Dada!

I have a confession to my loyal readers, numbering now in the single digits--the Bush re-coronation has been very bad for this website. What once began as strictly an anti-artistic endeavor, driven by a love of the absurd, has devolved into another political muckraking diatribe. One loyal reader pointed out:

The vast majority of the digerati, intelligentsia, and neo-liberal expansionists have abandoned irony for the duration. The clash of values has proven the superiority of the New Republican Man, and Dadaism will wither away. Among those supreme values is now Art, exemplified by the neo-Romantic landscapes by those of the painterly school, such as Thomas Kincade. To insist that Art has no utility, or worse, that that there is no Art, is to deny the message implied by the victors of the present value war: Life has meaning, and God has given it to us in abundance.

Astute readers of this site will recall that I did wring my hands over the fear that a Bush reelection would result, in the short term at least, in a marked decline in absurdity in American discourse. Lately I have asked myself, "Is meaninglessness dead? Can I assimulate myself into the new Republican world order?" (Although I am tempted to draw historical comparisons to an analogous historical event of the last century, I will, for the moment, refrain.)

Take, for instance, this email* that I received prior to the election, perhaps our last free one:

My name is (***), I am a nineteen year old girl from (***). I think that if you know what is good for your country then you know that George W. Bush is the right one to vote in to again be our Commander-in-Chief. I think that he has done a very good job on running this country. Far more better than Clinton ever did. Bush is a God fearing man and is not ashamed to say "God Bless America." I believe that without him we would have never caught Hussein, who is now where he needs to be. He is strong and he not only says that he will do something, but he actually does it. He has done well in helping gaurd our borders. He will not back down from a terrorist.

John Kerry is a fake. If he says something, he goes to change it by the next day. He wants to make sure that the UN is in favor of the US going to war before he does it. If that were to happen, we would never go to war, and this country would be hurt badly. Kerry gave support to communists in the war. He did whatever he could to get out of the service. John Kerry is a coward. He led VVAW members in a protest and they threw all of their medals and ribbons over a fence. Do you want a president who wants to please other countries before he thinks about America? I hope not.

*actual unsolicited email

With the election over, and the values brigade in charge, I fear that the plurality of 51% will become the new moral majority. People everywhere will embrace meaning, purpose, and divinity, and begin painting romantic landscapes in neo-classical mode. I see a revival in sacred harp music from the last century. Dress hems will lengthen. Perhaps seamed stockings will be revived. The Ten Commandments will become codified and integrated into contract law as well as torts, with a corresponding increase in our prison population, as more and more men (and women) begin to covet the wives of their neighbors that they previously had not even known.

What does this mean to Dadaists and anarchists everywhere? I don't know yet. There is, however, some hope. As more of our leaders begin to take advice from "God," I predict that we will see a movement away from boring legislation dealing with zoning rights and recapitalization percentages, and more toward a social engineering efforts to curb idleness and concupiscence. We will just have to see. Unfortunately, "God" seems to be in a warlike mood lately, at least according to someone we both know. And, to paraphrase our leaders, this is one war that threatens to outlive all of us, particularly this blog.

Back To The Future With Ol' Blue Eyes: Eminem's Mosh

Hey kids and swing fans--ol' Blue Eyes is back, for another century. I want to tell all you punks that you have nothing on this Jersey kid. You think you invented rap? In my neighborhood we lived rap. You're all just a bunch of talentless, two dollar hacks and whores. I had to come back, if for no other reason, to teach you kids how it's done, how we used to do it back in my 'hood. I intend to clean up this joint. I can't believe you let that Kitty broad write another book, and it was published. When I left, you had some decent people in charge of this place. Now it's just another racket on a blind alley to Dullsville. Even the aliens don't visit you no more. What happened to you? Turn around and look in the mirror. Yeah, you, punk. What's that shit you're listening to? Ashlee Simpson? Let me tell you something. That broad can't sing, and she can't swing. Now you look in that mirror and you tell Frankie, "I want to hear some real music." Say it! Now. Turn around. Clean yourself up. Put on a tie, for chrissakes! You look like shit. Go get a drink, kid. You need it.

Imagine it pourin’, it's rainin’ down on us
Moshpits outside the oval office
Someone’s tryin to tell us something
Maybe this is God just sayin' we're responsible
For this monster - this coward that we have empowered

Falluja