Nov 28, 2008
The Day Before W Became a War President
Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, The Pentagon , Monday, September 10, 2001 ~ http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430
"...The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.
Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary.
The adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.
In this building, despite this era of scarce resources taxed by mounting threats, money disappears into duplicative duties and bloated bureaucracy—not because of greed, but gridlock. Innovation is stifled—not by ill intent but by institutional inertia.
...Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business. Let's make no mistake: The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of some urgency. In fact, it could be said that it's a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American's. A new idea ignored may be the next threat overlooked. A person employed in a redundant task is one who could be countering terrorism or nuclear proliferation. Every dollar squandered on waste is one denied to the warfighter. That's why we're here today challenging us all to wage an all-out campaign to shift Pentagon's resources from bureaucracy to the battlefield, from tail to the tooth. We know the adversary. We know the threat. And with the same firmness of purpose that any effort against a determined adversary demands, we must get at it and stay at it. Some might ask, how in the world could the Secretary of Defense attack the Pentagon in front of its people? To them I reply, I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself. ...Business enterprises die if they fail to adapt, and the fact that they can fail and die is what provides the incentive to survive. But governments can't die, so we need to find other incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve.
The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.
...So today we declare war on bureaucracy, not people, but processes, a campaign to shift Pentagon resources from the tail to the tooth. All hands will be required, and it will take the best of all of us.
Now, like you, I've read that there are those who will oppose our every effort to save taxpayers' money and to strengthen the tooth-to- tail ratio. Well, fine, if there's to be a struggle, so be it. But keep in mind the story about the donkey, the burro, and the ass. The man and the boy were walking down the street with the donkey and people looked and laughed at them and said, "Isn't that foolish—they have a donkey and no one rides it." So the man said to the boy, "Get on the donkey; we don't want those people to think we're foolish." So they went down the road and people looked at the boy on the donkey and the man walking alongside -- "Isn't that terrible, that young boy is riding the donkey and the man's walking." So they changed places, went down the road, people looked and said, "Isn't that terrible, that strong man is up there on the donkey and making the little boy walk." So they both got up on the donkey, the donkey became exhausted, came to a bridge, fell in the river and drowned. And of course the moral of the story is, if you try to please everybody, you're going to lose your donkey. [Laughter.]
So as we all remember that if you do something, somebody's not going to like it, so be it. Our assignment is not to try to please everybody. This is not just about money. It's not about waste. It's about our responsibility to the men and women in uniform who put their lives at risk. We owe them the best training and the best equipment, and we need the resources to provide that. It's about respect for taxpayers' dollars. A cab driver in New York City ought to be able to feel confident that we care about those dollars."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, 9-10-2001
Nov 25, 2008
N.P.R. has Government and Corporate bias.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/health/22radio.html?_r=1&hp
Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties
An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular public radio program “The Infinite Mind” earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program.
The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drugmakers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Dr. Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is the first news media figure to be investigated.
Dr. Goodwin’s weekly radio programs have often touched on subjects important to the commercial interests of the companies for which he consults. In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, he warned that children with bipolar disorder who were left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view.
“But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin told his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”
That same day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. In all, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given to Congressional investigators show.
In an interview, Dr. Goodwin said that Bill Lichtenstein, the program’s producer, knew of his consulting but that neither thought “getting money from drug companies could be an issue.”
“In retrospect, that should have been disclosed,” he said.
...“The Infinite Mind” has won more than 60 journalism awards over 10 years and bills itself as “public radio’s most honored and listened to health and science program.” It has more than one million listeners in more than 300 radio markets. Mr. Lichtenstein said that the last original program was broadcast in October, that reruns have been running since and that “the show is going off the air.”
End of a Regime
~ The Cold War never ended. Bush I was Vice President and President when it supposedly ended... he ran our economy into the shitter and Clinton was given eight years... and now Bush II has gotten eight more (and the economy is in the shitter again...
the Soviets are'nt in Afghanistan anymore, but we are killing people there now.
We don't worry abut the Soviets spying on us anymore, our own government is doing it to us.
We don't worry about the Soviets attacking us, we are busy attacking the Middle East.
We don't worry about the communists restricting liberties, we are adjusting to the ones that are being taken from us, by ourselves.
We don't worry about the value of our money, we let our government just make more.
We don't plan on building a righteous future, we focus on reacting to corporate pillaging.
While Oil companies report record profits... again.
~
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-hallmann/why-america-feels-like-it_b_145873.html
Why America Feels Like it's Been Ruled by a Foreign Occupier
As Obama takes over the wreckage this country is in, one can't help but feel like something alien to America has been controlling it these past eight years. The wave of emotion that has erupted with the election of Barack Obama reminds me of the Allied victory in France in WWII. After a long foreign occupation in which foreign German interests occupied the agenda of France, French governance would once again be representing the concerns of it's populace. That hope seems to pervade America after it's long neocons occupation. Here are a few of the parallels that I see.
- American Public Opinion Has Been Ignored
Polling has consistently shown that the American government pursues an agenda far to the right of American public opinion. For the slight margin of victory that Bush had in both elections he won, the sweeping changes he pursued illuminate his disregard for the sizable chunk of our society that disagree with him.
When Dick Cheney was questioned on ABC about whether the fact that two thirds of Americans were opposed to the Iraq War had any influence on decision-making, he basically said that the American people get to make their input every four years and after that they can be ignored. The government is there to represent the people and now that it seems like that is returning; joy is understandable.
- Core American Values Overturned
America fought a revolution to have its opinions represented by it's government. That has faded in Bush's term. America set up the UN after World War II to set up international law and put an end to military aggression and imperialism. That went out the window. Habeas Corpus was inherited from England where it originated in the 12th Century. Bush in that sense has embraced the morals of the middle ages. Along that line, America reinstituted the use of torture. England discontinued its use in the 1600's Frederick the Great ended it in Prussia in 1740, Italy in 1786, France in 1789, and Russia in 1801. Besides moral reasons, the practice was written off as ineffective in terms of yielding useful information. This administrations moral conduct is clearly alien to the values of most Americans.
- Basic Infrastructure Neglected
Bridges, roads, and environmental standards have degraded these past eight years. What could be of more interest to a population than the upkeep of these vital elements of society? Clearly the vital interests of the population did not matter. You would have to be completely foreign to what America is not to see it, as basic infrastructure degraded tremendously in Bush's tenure.
- National Resources Diverted Overseas
If you study any foreign occupation, one common thread would be that national wealth would be diverted into foreign lands. While American healthcare, education, and infrastructure languished, we dumped billions of dollars into Iraq and pursued an otherwise aggressive and destructive foreign policy across the world at large at tremendous cost.
On top of that, national debt doubled the past eight years. It's like America lost a war, suffered an occupation and had to pay a 5 trillion dollar indemnity. We're in a similar position to France in 1870 or Germany in 1919 in that our common interests have been ignored, we've pursued an aggressive foreign policy to our own detriment and we are now deeply in debt.
- Propaganda Tuned Up
Bush took the stance of a foreign occupier in his governance- rational argument would never win the minds and hearts of the masses so crude propaganda such as Fox News was trotted out to scare and paralyze America into obedience. The same quest for obedience through misinformation and crude scare tactics are the same you see in the totalitarian governments from South America to Asia that have brought nothing but misery to their own people and the world at large.
Nov 22, 2008
After 8 years of lacking bipartisanship...
"If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you'd instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship," said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/22/obama-considering-commiss_n_145729.html
~~
At this point I think it is reasonable to wonder what kind of a crime could be proven that actually would make G.W. Bush defend himself in a court of law... or even in dialogue with his people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/22/obama-considering-commiss_n_145729.html
~~
At this point I think it is reasonable to wonder what kind of a crime could be proven that actually would make G.W. Bush defend himself in a court of law... or even in dialogue with his people.
Nov 19, 2008
Change?
"His ( Obama's ) outwardly progressive "change" persona is perfectly calibrated to divert, capture, control, and contain coming popular rebellions. He is uniquely qualified to simultaneously surf, de-fang, and "manage" the U.S. and world citizenry's hopes for radical and democratic transformation in the wake of the Bush-Cheney nightmare."
"Emmanuel ( chosen by Obama for Chief of Staff ) is a former leading member of the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Formed by business-oriented elites to increase the Democratic Party's distance from labor, environmentalism, blacks, and Civil Rights, the DLC's mission was to steer the party closer to the corporate, imperial, southern, suburban, and racially accomodationist center. It's goal was to advance post-partisan convergence between Democratic and Republican agendas and to impose economically and racially regressive polices underneath the cloak of "progressive" strategy and "pragmatic" "realism."
Emmanuel was a leading Clinton administration agent of the corporate-globalizationist investors-rights bill called the "North American Free Trade Agreement." He is a leading liaison between corporate funding sources and the Democratic Party.
The son a wealthy Israeli doctor, he is a fierce defender of Israel's apartheid regime and its illegal occupation of Palestine.
He played a critical role in favoring conservative and pro-war Democrats over progressive antiwar Democrats during the 2006 congressional primaries."
~~~~
To be fair , these men have not even yet assumed their leadership positions. There is great hope for peace, economic and environmental growth and social development.
We have had too much destructive policy for far too long.
I pray that this new administration does not further any foreign or domestic wars,
ends or at least minimizes the war on drugs and expanding prison industry,
stops protecting and enhancing the pro-corporate neo-liberal exploitation of earth
and supports radical protection of natural land and environment.
Nov 14, 2008
Speculative non-fiction by William Gibson concerning science fiction.
"The single most useful thing I've learned from science fiction is that every present moment, always, is someone else's past and someone else's future...
If I could magically access one body of knowledge from the real future, I think I'd choose either their history of the ancient past or whatever they might have that most resembles science fiction. The products of two different speculative activities. They'll know a lot more about our past than we do, and trying to reverse-engineer history out of dreams, as I recall, was quite a uniquely exciting activity." ~William Gibson
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026821.600-scifi-special-william-gibson.html
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/index.asp
~~
This liar and war criminal has been assaulting the values and stated goals of the United States of America in the present moment and the past. ( since 1980 if you count his father as well.)
But 2009 will strip him of his powers as "the Decider"
and our future awaits...
can the people heal and return to a policy of peace,
or will we further fragment into isolated and paranoid tribes
that use patriotism as an excuse to argue
while we are getting fucked up.
~~~
If I could magically access one body of knowledge from the real future, I think I'd choose either their history of the ancient past or whatever they might have that most resembles science fiction. The products of two different speculative activities. They'll know a lot more about our past than we do, and trying to reverse-engineer history out of dreams, as I recall, was quite a uniquely exciting activity." ~William Gibson
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026821.600-scifi-special-william-gibson.html
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/index.asp
…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.
—William Gibson in an interview on CNN, August 26, 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson
~~
This liar and war criminal has been assaulting the values and stated goals of the United States of America in the present moment and the past. ( since 1980 if you count his father as well.)
But 2009 will strip him of his powers as "the Decider"
and our future awaits...
can the people heal and return to a policy of peace,
or will we further fragment into isolated and paranoid tribes
that use patriotism as an excuse to argue
while we are getting fucked up.
~~~
The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003[120]
ABC glasnost forces Ayers to articulate a defense... this is media as a pro-government weapon.
The aggressive opinions of this interviewer betray him as prosecutor, not reporter.
The Weather Underground is a 2002 documentary film based on the rise and fall of the American radical organization The Weathermen. The group's goal was to "bring the (Vietnam) War home" through acts of terrorism.
* "We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence." -Naomi Jaffe
* "Once Richard Nixon was elected president and inaugurated in January 1969, we were targeted, bam, bam, bam, by a very sophisticated, advanced, counterintelligence program; At the same time, by very crude and violent police." -Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panther Party
* "This pattern of harassment is going on against the Black Panther Party across the country. On Friday, the Watts office of the Black Panther Party was bombed and demolished. Last week the Des Moines office was bombed. They can't stop anything we're doing as a legitimate political organization so they come in and shoot us and shoot tear gas at us like they've lost they minds." -Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panther Party
The Weather Underground is a 2002 documentary film based on the rise and fall of the American radical organization The Weathermen. The group's goal was to "bring the (Vietnam) War home" through acts of terrorism.
* "We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence." -Naomi Jaffe
* "Once Richard Nixon was elected president and inaugurated in January 1969, we were targeted, bam, bam, bam, by a very sophisticated, advanced, counterintelligence program; At the same time, by very crude and violent police." -Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panther Party
* "This pattern of harassment is going on against the Black Panther Party across the country. On Friday, the Watts office of the Black Panther Party was bombed and demolished. Last week the Des Moines office was bombed. They can't stop anything we're doing as a legitimate political organization so they come in and shoot us and shoot tear gas at us like they've lost they minds." -Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Black Panther Party
Nov 13, 2008
Return sovereignty
"Our Mother is the Earth. All the plants, whatever is on earth is... some of it is our food, and some are medicines and that's how we live on. And as though we are the children of our mother Earth and how she feeds us is causing the whole thing. We are going through suffering from everything that... what the B.I.A. is doing to my nation." ~ Roberta Blackgoat
Broken Rainbow is a 1985 documentary film about the government-enforced relocation of thousands of Navajo Native Americans from their ancestral homes in Arizona. The Navajo were relocated to aid mining speculation in a process that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. The film is narrated by Martin Sheen. The title song was written by Laura Nyro.
Nov 11, 2008
Nov 9, 2008
Bush II "the lesser" provoked 9-11, now he leaves us with what sounds like even worse.
Warnings from world leaders all within 72 hours
http://www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com/israelnews/politics/80-political/335-warnings-from-world-leaders-all-within-72-hours-.html
"Over the last 72 hours there has been a strange melange of cryptic messages leaked from world political leaders about what could be in store for America over the next few months.
These predictions of impending doom come from England, France, Australia and the United States.
Biden told the top Democratic donors that a “generated crisis” will develop within six months and Barak Obama will need the help of community leaders to control the population as unpopular decisions are made and Americans resist.
Biden speaking at the fundraiser, “I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate, And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”
Biden’s ominous language at the Seattle Sheraton are followed with statements by long time establishment insiders Colin Powell and Madeline Albright both say there is a massive crisis on the horizon and Biden was simply making a “statement in fact.”
“The problems will always be there and there’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.” Powell told Meet the Press.
Lord West, adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown on national security says, “There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring. It dipped slightly and is now rising again within the context of severe. The threat is huge. We have done all the things that we need to do, but the threat is building - the complex plots are building,”
Across the channel from England you have the French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warning the press that he believes Israel will strike Iran before they can develope nuclear weapons completley ignoring the fact that the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBradei, said that Iran lacks the key components to produce an atomic weapon.
“The devastation that could be wreaked by one major nuclear weapons incident alone puts 9/11 and almost everything else [in] to the category of the insignificant,” Rudd said.
Why are there so many high level politicians around the world in a seemingly coordinated effort warning of huge threats and developing crisis’ that may include a nuclear device? Are they preparing the masses for an event or series of events that have been in the making for some time? Is the public being prepared for new and forming enemies with a potential to plunge the entire world into war?"
----end quote---
A number of notable public figures, to be sure; Biden, Rudd, Colin Powell, Matelaine Albright, Lord West and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. Taken alone there are plenty of ready explanations, but within 72hrs.?
Are there any more recent examples out there?
(Daily News Caster)
http://www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com/israelnews/politics/80-political/335-warnings-from-world-leaders-all-within-72-hours-.html
Nov 3, 2008
BOHICA
http://slackeruprising.com
If John McCain is declared the victor of tomorrow's election
it proves that
voting is a lie,
white power is flagrantly shameless,
fundamentalist Christians attack the U.S.A. more than any Muslim ever has
and Bush's New World Order continues.
If John McCain is declared the victor of tomorrow's election
it proves that
voting is a lie,
white power is flagrantly shameless,
fundamentalist Christians attack the U.S.A. more than any Muslim ever has
and Bush's New World Order continues.
Oct 19, 2008
Broken Democracy
http://www.gregpalast.com/rolling-stone-its-already-stolen/
Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.
- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.
- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.
Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.
- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."
- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.
There's more:
- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."
Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.
The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.
"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."
The investigators level a deadly serious charge:
"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."
Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.
[Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]
Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org
http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/
Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.
- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.
- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.
Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.
- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."
- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.
There's more:
- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."
Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.
The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.
"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."
The investigators level a deadly serious charge:
"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."
Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.
[Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]
Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org
http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/
Oct 18, 2008
Chocolate or Vanilla, but no Nader/McKinney allowed
So,
Voting accuracy has been a major unaddressed issue since Bush II stole his first election.
Only the Green Party has made an effort to push for reform,
but Nader was blamed for Bush's win.
They are still blocked out of the mass media.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/16/breaking_the_sound_barrier_third_party
RALPH NADER: "...what should have been said was the big-time terrorists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, these are clinically verifiable mass terrorists who have killed innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in their criminal wars of aggression. These are criminal wars of aggression. These are war crimes. These are war criminals. They have killed over a million Iraqi civilians as a result of that criminal invasion. That’s where the discussion should have focused on. The big-time terrorists, the state terrorists in the White House who have violated our Constitution, our statutes and our international treaties, and have been condemned even by the American Bar Association for a continual violence of our—violation of our Constitution.
AMY GOODMAN: Cynthia McKinney?
CYNTHIA McKINNEY: First of all, I think I should say that I believe that the people in this country need a political party and a movement that places our values on the political agenda. Obviously, with that exchange, that’s not the case.
There’s something else that’s a bit more troubling. I’ve also been talking about election integrity as I’ve gone across this country. But, you know, I really don’t like the idea that the face of election fraud, given the past two presidential elections, is now a face of color and one of poor people.
In 2000, when people went to the polls, when the voters went to the polls, they were met with confusing ballots, manipulation of the voter lists, electronic voting machines that didn’t work, inappropriately or ineffectively or poorly trained officials who weren’t familiar with the workings of those machines, and we know what the problems with those machines have been and are. We still have those problems that have been with us since 2000.
In 2004, they added to these problems with the electronic poll books, the sleepovers that were discovered, where the machines weren’t even secured, even intensifying the failures of the machines with the vote flipping, and usually in only one direction. The battery freezes in the midst of voters actually trying to cast their votes.
And now we’ve got voter ID laws across the country, and we’ve got voter caging, which is a fancy way of purging people from the voter files.
So, now, what kind of election is it when neither of the political parties is addressing the issue, the fundamental issue, of whether or not our votes are even going to be counted?"
Voting accuracy has been a major unaddressed issue since Bush II stole his first election.
Only the Green Party has made an effort to push for reform,
but Nader was blamed for Bush's win.
They are still blocked out of the mass media.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/16/breaking_the_sound_barrier_third_party
RALPH NADER: "...what should have been said was the big-time terrorists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, these are clinically verifiable mass terrorists who have killed innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in their criminal wars of aggression. These are criminal wars of aggression. These are war crimes. These are war criminals. They have killed over a million Iraqi civilians as a result of that criminal invasion. That’s where the discussion should have focused on. The big-time terrorists, the state terrorists in the White House who have violated our Constitution, our statutes and our international treaties, and have been condemned even by the American Bar Association for a continual violence of our—violation of our Constitution.
AMY GOODMAN: Cynthia McKinney?
CYNTHIA McKINNEY: First of all, I think I should say that I believe that the people in this country need a political party and a movement that places our values on the political agenda. Obviously, with that exchange, that’s not the case.
There’s something else that’s a bit more troubling. I’ve also been talking about election integrity as I’ve gone across this country. But, you know, I really don’t like the idea that the face of election fraud, given the past two presidential elections, is now a face of color and one of poor people.
In 2000, when people went to the polls, when the voters went to the polls, they were met with confusing ballots, manipulation of the voter lists, electronic voting machines that didn’t work, inappropriately or ineffectively or poorly trained officials who weren’t familiar with the workings of those machines, and we know what the problems with those machines have been and are. We still have those problems that have been with us since 2000.
In 2004, they added to these problems with the electronic poll books, the sleepovers that were discovered, where the machines weren’t even secured, even intensifying the failures of the machines with the vote flipping, and usually in only one direction. The battery freezes in the midst of voters actually trying to cast their votes.
And now we’ve got voter ID laws across the country, and we’ve got voter caging, which is a fancy way of purging people from the voter files.
So, now, what kind of election is it when neither of the political parties is addressing the issue, the fundamental issue, of whether or not our votes are even going to be counted?"
Oct 12, 2008
Motecuzoma's Revenge
This global economic turmoil is a result of three zeros.
The Nation of Mexico worked within this gap in 1993 by removing three zeros from it's currency. It created a new peso, worth 1,000 of the original one.
Now, 15 years later... the digital financial market of the entire globe is revealed
to be trading (in only one specific economic market)
500 trillion dollars.
The current estimate of the value of all goods and services currently and actually existing right now on Earth is about 60 trillion dollars.
This means (mathematically) that 15 years after Mexico publicly removed three zeros from its physical currency,
the U.S.A. (and as a result, the global financial markets) are exposed for adding three zeros... to legal financial contracts
regarding not physical currency, but rather the obligation to pay in the future...
more often than not by digital transfer of numbers in bank accounts
still not affecting the physical currency.
It remains to be seen what will affect the American Dollar,
which has pretty much always added one zero to the new peso.
~~~
The Spanish dollar or Mexican peso was widely used in the early United States. By a decree of July 6, 1785, the value of the United States dollar was set to approximately match the Spanish dollar, both of which were based on the weight of silver in the coins.[1] The first U.S. dollar coins were not issued until April 2, 1792, and the peso continued to be officially recognized and used, along with other foreign coins, until February 21, 1857. In Canada, it remained legal tender, along with other foreign silver coins, until 1854 and continued to circulate beyond that date. [1] The Mexican peso also served as the model for the Straits dollar, the Hong Kong dollar, the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan. [2] The term yuan refers to the round Spanish dollars, Mexican pesos and other 8 reales silver coins which saw use in China during the 19th century.
...On 1 January 1993, the Bank of Mexico introduced a new currency, the nuevo peso ("new peso", or MXN), written "N$" followed by the numerical amount. One new peso, or N$1.00, was equal to 1000 of the obsolete MXP pesos.
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Sci/sci.research.careers/2008-01/msg00604.html
As the derivatives business has grown more complex, it has also
ballooned in scale. Broadly speaking, Das - author of a leading
textbook on derivatives and complex securities - estimates that
investors worldwide hold more than $500 trillion worth of
derivatives.
This number now dwarfs the global GDP, which tops out around $60
trillion.
Political Poemics
it all felt different before Reagan took power thirty years ago
ever since Bush was a Vice President
freedom meant protection to pursue liberation
we were a nation led by Christians who taught that all faiths were welcome
even no faith.
3,000 died to jihad on Sept. 11
Over a half-million killed in Iraq
and now
the Bush regime must pass the baton
or stop pretending it promotes democracy
while corporation mathematicians are exposed for inventing money
by using legal contracts to add
three zeros
to the fundamentals of our global economic values
as mass media continues to project and provoke every conversation
that reinforces failed policies and stereotypes
while the social and political elite
find comfort in the company and wisdom
of the common folk they are exploiting
and neglecting.
Our government is currently better at incarcerating civilians
than counting our votes.
ever since Bush was a Vice President
freedom meant protection to pursue liberation
we were a nation led by Christians who taught that all faiths were welcome
even no faith.
3,000 died to jihad on Sept. 11
Over a half-million killed in Iraq
and now
the Bush regime must pass the baton
or stop pretending it promotes democracy
while corporation mathematicians are exposed for inventing money
by using legal contracts to add
three zeros
to the fundamentals of our global economic values
as mass media continues to project and provoke every conversation
that reinforces failed policies and stereotypes
while the social and political elite
find comfort in the company and wisdom
of the common folk they are exploiting
and neglecting.
Our government is currently better at incarcerating civilians
than counting our votes.
Oct 11, 2008
McCain's friends
At his second debate, where there was a hand-picked live national audience, John McCain used the phrase "my friends" 19 times.
"1. Hello, my friend! Throughout J's performance, he addresses L as "my friend," an expression that Apaches think Anglo-Americans bandy about in a thoroughly irresponsible way. There is no word in Western Apache that corresponds precisely to the English lexeme friend. The nearest equivalent is shich'inzhoni (toward me, he is good), an expression used only by individuals who have known each other for many years and, on the basis of this experience, have developed strong feelings of mutual confidence and respect. In contrast, Apaches note, Anglo-Americans refer to and address as "friends" persons they have scarcely met, persisting in this practice even when it is evident from other things they say and do that they hold these individuals in low esteem. More specifically, Whitemen are said to make liberal use of the term when they want something from someone, apparently believing that by professing affection and concern they can improve their chances of getting it. In short, Anglo-Americans pretend to what cannot and should not be pretended to - hasty friendship - and it strikes Apaches as the height of folly and presumptuousness that they do. One of my consultants put it succinctly: "Whiteman say you're their friend like it was nothing, like it was air."
(This is followed by a cartoon on the top of the next page, depicting a white man with glasses and a bolo tie draping his arm around the shoulders of an indigenous American and saying, "Hello my friend... how are you doing? Let me introduce myself.."
while the Apache man is thinking "must be election time again")"
Portraits of "the Whiteman"
Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache
by Keith H. Basso
1979, pages 48,49
"1. Hello, my friend! Throughout J's performance, he addresses L as "my friend," an expression that Apaches think Anglo-Americans bandy about in a thoroughly irresponsible way. There is no word in Western Apache that corresponds precisely to the English lexeme friend. The nearest equivalent is shich'inzhoni (toward me, he is good), an expression used only by individuals who have known each other for many years and, on the basis of this experience, have developed strong feelings of mutual confidence and respect. In contrast, Apaches note, Anglo-Americans refer to and address as "friends" persons they have scarcely met, persisting in this practice even when it is evident from other things they say and do that they hold these individuals in low esteem. More specifically, Whitemen are said to make liberal use of the term when they want something from someone, apparently believing that by professing affection and concern they can improve their chances of getting it. In short, Anglo-Americans pretend to what cannot and should not be pretended to - hasty friendship - and it strikes Apaches as the height of folly and presumptuousness that they do. One of my consultants put it succinctly: "Whiteman say you're their friend like it was nothing, like it was air."
(This is followed by a cartoon on the top of the next page, depicting a white man with glasses and a bolo tie draping his arm around the shoulders of an indigenous American and saying, "Hello my friend... how are you doing? Let me introduce myself.."
while the Apache man is thinking "must be election time again")"
Portraits of "the Whiteman"
Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache
by Keith H. Basso
1979, pages 48,49
Oct 10, 2008
Leader Shipped
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/10/10/bush_on_crisis
Bill Radke: Thank you for joining us this Friday morning as we continue with Fallout: our special coverage of the global financial crisis. President Bush spoke moments ago in the White House Rose Garden:
President George W. Bush: Fellow citizens, we can solve this crisis, and we will.
The president did not make any specific policy announcements. The statement was intended to calm the markets.
President George W. Bush: The United States government is acting. We will continue to act to resolve this crisis and restore stability to our markets.
What effect might Bush's statement have? Marketplace's Jeremy Hobson has that from New York.
Jeremy Hobson: The president has made mostly brief statements about the financial crisis, and he hasn't held a full-blown press conference since July, when he said he thought the banking system was sound. There were no questions today, just a list of the steps the government has taken in recent days.
~~~~
That is what was broadcast nationwide today on our citizen and government funded National Public Radio.
With all of the bravado and bluster, confidence and arrogance that King George II "the lesser" has led us with (against our will) for the past eight years,
he has become near invisible... and Dick Cheney has achieved full invisibility.
His poor decisions and actions have rendered him useless to our private and public lives...
as the rest of the world attempts to comprehend all of the possible scenarios he is capable of unleashing on our planet with the few remaining months of his absolute monarchy.
His lack of vision and governance has sent shockwaves from the streets of New Orleans to the mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq
and now eight years of his economic policies have redifined global monetary banking and lending.
The spooky thing about him is that all of this is happening right now and he is still content to publicly fulfill his role as president by reducing himself to the emotional and informational equivalent of "Play-by-play announcer to the Government of the United States of America."
Oct 4, 2008
Quartering Federal Troops
So we had Blackwater and the National Guard head to Iraq for our false war
and now the Army is deploying within our borders to continue it here.Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/ 3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 16:16:12 EDT
Posted : Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 16:16:12 EDT
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
...They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.
...The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.
“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”
The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.
“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.
“I’m not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds ... it put me on my knees in seconds.”
The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Posse Comitatus Act
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law () passed on June 16, 1878 after the end of Reconstruction. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states, their counties and municipal divisions) in the former Confederate states.
The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act.
The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement.
~~~~~~~~~~
http://obrag.org/?p=1652Army Now Denies Domestic Deployed Brigade to Be Used for Law Enforcement
Posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 by Frank Gormlie @ 3:01 pm
Army Col. Michael Boatner, of the US Army’s Northern Command, denied to the website Homeland Security Today that all the blog talk of a US Army combat brigade that is deployed for domestic purposes will be used for law enforcement and crowd control. He stated: “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance or crowd control, but will be used to support lead agencies involved in saving lives, relieving suffering and meeting the needs of communities affected by weapons of mass destruction attacks, accidents or even natural disasters.” Col. Boatner is the future operations division chief of the command unit.
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was told by Air Force Lt. Col. Jamie Goodpaster, a public affairs officer for Northern Command, that “Military forces would have weapons on-site, “containerized,” she said — that is, stored in containers — including both lethal and so-called nonlethal weapons. They would have mostly wheeled vehicles, but would also, she said, have access to tanks. She said that use of weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary of defense level.”
Sep 23, 2008
a non-fiction on fictional Arbre from down the wick
This is a conversation that takes place on a fifth world and references planet Earth in discussing a philosophical statement by Ralph Waldo Emerson~
" ... a philosopher named Emerson who had some useful upsights about the difference between poets and mystics. I'm thinking that it's just as applicable in our cosmos as it is in his."
"I'll bite, what's the difference?"
"The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting."
page 883, Anathem 2008 Neal Stephenson
http://www.longnow.org/anathem/
http://www.nealstephenson.com/
~
The mystic and the poet each experience truth in different ways... each creating their own reality of truth.
Republicans and Democrats each experience truth in different ways, each creating their own reality of truth as well.
The U.S. Government is actively working towards limiting the truth of that conversation for every inhabitant of planet Earth.
Actively pursuing covert and open war... mass murders and mass incarcerations,
maintaining complete surveillance of global telecommunication systems,
manipulation of global economic power with long term vision reserved for the rich and corporations.
The C.I.A. has been in the White House since V.P. Bush in 1980.
If you believe in Patriotism, than the C.I.A. exists as a covert servant of the people of the U.S.A. It has chosen to elect Bush II for the past 8 years. It is now advocating McCain/Palin for 2008.
If you believe the U.S.A. is corrupted and Patriotism has become no more than an abstract argument or nostalgic memory, then the C.I.A. has become more of a regulator of freedom than a guardian of it.
These are two possible realities to confront the state of our nation.
The U.S. Government and the mainstream media (television, national newspapers and radio) does not allow certain topics to be debated on a national level.
1. Support of Israel
2. Peace with Iran
3. Criticism of Saudi Arabia
4. U.S. Military and Covert operations in Latin America
5. Reparations for broken treaties
6. Ending the War on Drugs
It is possible that the C.I.A. tries to be a mystic while fantasizing it is a poet...
whatever truth it is hiding from the U.S.A. is destroying the morale of it's citizens through
1. Contentious and false elections
2. Pharmaceutical pacification of the public.
3. Global war on false pretenses
4. Rapid growth and use of prisons
A fictional entity from Arbe in Anathem can see the truth in the duality of poets and mystics that Emerson described to Americans over 100 years ago...
perhaps the C.I.A. will realize that unbridled truth is superior to covert manipulation of it
and liquidate itself.
Jul 10, 2008
the Eclipse Chaser con tres huevos
Nobody for President
~ the musical
Last weekend in August 2008
Wylie CK Campground
Outside Granite Falls WA
Llywyd de Void
a.k.a. Lloyd Watson
~ the musical
Last weekend in August 2008
Wylie CK Campground
Outside Granite Falls WA
Llywyd de Void
a.k.a. Lloyd Watson
)
Jul 5, 2008
Nelson's Mandala
مرسلة بواسطة el Duderino في
my rational mind can logically justify the fact that everything i do on the computer is broadcast live on the big screen in times square 24/7
i.t.t.
my rational mind can logically justify the fact that everything i do on the computer is broadcast live on the big screen in times square 24/7
i.t.t.
Jul 3, 2008
Jul 2, 2008
flute child
He walked into the shade of a table on the side of the brick paved road. In the u.s.a. he was used to very prompt service, waiters would be nearly invasive with their attention to tables. Here it sometimes took ten minutes or more for anyone to approach the table once seated. He leaned back in one of the ever-present curved, white plastic stackable chairs. His eyes adjusted to the oddity of pleasant lighting under the thatched roof, totally surrounded by the brilliant glare of the tropical noonday sun. When the sun was high in the sky it commanded respect. To simply stand under it's power unprotected sucked energy and nutrients out of him. And the sweat, of course. So much heat would gather at the crown of his forehead that it felt like it was touching flame. This caused a virtual fountain which trickled continuously into his eyes. It would sometimes irritate him, so he would wipe his forehead with forearm. Instantly the sun scorched the spot again and the process repeated until dizzy and half blind, shade was found. Once taking shade it was at least ten minutes until his body was at full rest, his eyes were totally adjusted, his breathing had become unlabored, and his skin was dry to the touch.
Sheltered and now relaxed, a girl took his drink order and left him a menu.
Since most of the juices were fresh squeezed the drinks often took another five to ten minutes to arrive. The heat of the place lent itself to slow service. Over-exertion quickly caused an enormous amount of sweat and effort. Slow and steady always won the race here. In the noonday sun everyone who could nearly shut down for an hour or more of siesta. The sun became so intense that just being exposed to it sapped strength and even made thoughts slower, more difficult to produce. Finding shade was necessary... finding a hammock to lie in was divine. Being cradled in the warm air felt like the womb must have, our original home. Occasional breezes would wrap around his body and gently rock him back and forth. It was an ancient rest. To share that comfort with the presence of friends or strangers in nearbye hammocks was also incredible. Such public displays of comfortable rest were rarely seen in in the u.s.a., sunbathing being an exception. But here complete strangers would relax even though fully exposed, hanging helpless in a net above the ground. It felt good to be close to trusting strangers that were so relaxed.
George had placed an order for chicken mole', he had read that mole was made from chocolate sauce and he really wanted to try some. Chocolate and chicken, quite a mix. He was becoming accustomed to the slow service. There were only about six tables at the apparently nameless restaurant. A young family at a table close by was looking through a stack of dvd's that the place had for rent. The children were pleading to watch a computer generated film about animals. It was a lovely day. George watched a beautiful girl walk down the street and he longed to talk to her, to know her. He suppressed the loneliness with a wistful smile and a sip of water. From somewhere behind him a single note began to play. It slowly developed into a simple sounding tune, one that played well off of the chatter of the restaurant and street... the crashing of the waves. It slowly gained in confidence and clarity to the point that George was surprised no-one around him was commenting on it. The tune was innocent and pure, it lacked the slickness of a typical public performance. The honesty of the sound humbled him. It was like listening to a friend bear their heart to him without cloaking the words in pride or ego. After a minute or more, the initial simplicity of the tune evolved somehow. The single notes linked together suddenly seemed to not only compliment the world here at the corner restaurant, but they began to help shape it as well. Even if the other diners had not visibly stopped to listen, their conversations had all unconsciously incorporated the tune into their moments. While at first the tune was a stranger to them all, it had become welcome somehow. A cool breeze from the ocean added to this sense of welcome. A tiny child came walking through the tables of the restaurant then, holding out a worn sombrero upside down for donations. George was so moved by her beauty and poverty that he did not offer her any coins... he just watched her with his heart in his throat. It was her father playing the flute, and he played it for her. It was his music about her, it was his music for her. George observed their visible poverty, compassion and respect washed over him. Perhaps all that man owned in the world was his flute and the love of his baby girl but there was pride in that. There was truth and honesty there that was so real no-one could ever take it from them. George sensed it went deeper than that even. The man held tradition in his flute, his tune and his love for the girl. His song was an ancient song, a timeless song. He did not sing it for money or food or the desire of comfort, he sang it to protect his love. He sang it to prepare the street for the presence of his divine child. His divine love. All of the money in the world could not wrap her in the secure love of his simple songs. He was her herald, his flute paved the way for her presence. She was not a beggar, she was a goddess who lived outside of the world of business transactions and interest rates. She lived on the gifts of strangers and the love of her father.
This was unexpected and overwhelming to George, and as he was still processing all of these feelings and revelations the two slipped farther down the street out of view... and soon even the flute song faded from his perceptions. They had been so unexpected and real, like when a herd of deer unexpectedly appeared at the side of a road staring silent and proud at the loud cars roaring past. There was a chasm in George's mind between the real and true and the nonsense and confusion... this man and child were living with pure love and truth, it humbled him.
Fiction Under Democracy
George got out of a white and yellow taxi, retrieved his backback from the trunk and paid the driver with 120 pesos, "Muchas gracias" and a large smile. When the cab drove off he could hear waves crashing. He walked under the archway of the "San Cristobal" because it was the nearest hotel, leaving the hot dirt of the street for the cool sand of it's arching entrance. He checked in for one night, dropped his belongings in a small room and switched his sneakers for flip flops, cargo shorts for swim trunks. He wondered if he would use the protection of the mosquito net hanging over the bed that night. It was the first he had ever seen in his life. Grabbing a book and a towel he headed to the beach in front of the "San Cristobal". The sun was so hot he quickly sought shade and read snippets of Let's Go! Mexico when he wasn't busy people watching and observing all the differences between this beach and the ones at New Jersey shores he had grown up with. There were still sea gulls... but many more pelicans with huge long beaks that they used to grab fish from the smooth curl of waves just before they broke. Tiny crabs would occasionally pop out of holes in the sand and scuttle amidst tiny sea shells. Skinny, tired looking wild dogs slept in any shade they could find or grabbed any food that beach tourists had forgotten... or didn't constantly guard. A young boy and an older mexican man were tossing a weighted net into the shallows as the broken waves slid back into the sea. They used attached lines to draw in the net, collecting dozens of tiny sardines nearly every time. The shiny floppers were dropped into a well used five-gallon bucket.
There were no ice-cream trucks or boardwalks with caramel corn and Italian water ices, no pizza shops with huge slices for sale. No beach tags required, no cotton candy. There were grandmothers walking the beach with food for tourists and they amazed George. Despite the heat and their age they walked the entire length of the beach in long colorful skirts with huge tupperware bowls perched impossibly on the tops of their heads. After meeting a few he realized that each was carrying something entirely different than the other. One woman had a collection of hard pastries that had been baked in the nearest city. Another had peanuts and home-made candybars that looked like a box of Cracker-Jacks compressed into a solid rectangle. She explained that she had made them herself the day before. For lunch he bought three fish tacos for one U.S. dollar from a grandmother who lived one town away and explained that this was the fourth and final beach she would walk that day. Her son was a fisher and gave her the fish she had used. The red salsa she poured over them was incredible and she had made it herself. The guidebook he had been reading warned against eating local lettuce since it held alot of water that may affect digestive systems not used to the local bacterias... but George wolfed down the three tacos and loved them. He simply could not let the threat of diarreah keep him from this kind of food. It all just made so much sense. The tortillas had been made that day locally, the lettuce was grown nearbye, the salsa was homemade and the fish had been swimming in the ocean in front of him just yesterday morning. All for a price so reasonable it made him feel guilty.
A young teenage boy pushed a wheelbarrow half filled with coconuts up to him. "Coco Loco?" the boy asked and George said yes without knowing what that was... just knowing it would be neat to have a coconut like the ones hanging from trees above him. The little man grabbed a well used machete resting between two arms of the wheelbarrow and sliced a section off the top of a green coconut with four firm chops. He poured a shot of rum inside the small hole and stuck a plastic straw in it, asking for three dollars. George paid, thinking how much more work went into the fish tacos that cost so much less. The coconut milk was sweet and satisfying, he would have preferred it without the rum... which made his hot head feel even heavier in the heat. When he finished the Coco Loco a more experienced fellow tourist from Canada showed him how to split the remains open and use the original chunk of cut coconut shell to scrape the inside. He would never have realized all that fresh coconut meat was waiting in there for him... this was possibly the first edible beverage container he had ever used in his life.
The next morning he awoke to the sound of roosters crowing. At first he was able to ignore them and rest a bit more, but there were alot and they became more insistent as the morning sun crept into the sky. He began sweating too much to lie there anymore. The San Cristobal had a restaurant on the beach side of the hotel in the beach sand. He sat down at a table for two and looked over the menu. There was no way he was ordering a soda when the menu listed fresh squeezed orange, mango, pineapple and watermelon juice. The same fruits were listed as pitchers of "Licuado de" which the waiter explained was a mixture of the juice with water and sugar. He ordered what turned out to be his favorite beverage until the day he died... "Una mezcla de licuado de pina y sandia, por favor senor." It was watermelon and pineapple juice mixed with sugar water. He noticed a cup of coffee cost 10 pesos (one dollar) which was the same as it cost in Wawas from New Jersey to Virgina. He had read once that the Wawa stores were named after a small Pennsylvania town which had in turn been named after an Ojibwe (american indian) word for goose like in the poem "Song for Hiawatha"...
"All the wild-fowl sang them to him,
In the moorlands and the fen-lands,
In the melancholy marshes;
Chetowaik, the plover, sang them,
Mahng, the loon, the wild-goose, Wawa..." ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
George had learned how to enjoy coffee from Wawas in high school. Many people did, Wawa sold over 165 million cups a year. But this cup was so much better. It was pure Oaxacan beans... so sweet it reminded him of hot chocolate. Corn and coffee had lined the road to town for many miles in dry fields with patches of pale green. His pancakes were small but delicious... the waiter brought a tiny pitcher of local honey instead of maple syrup. The taste was much more delicate than the lucious molasses of tree sap. He pinched some chili powder onto his eggs then salted them with another pinch... there were no salt and pepper shakers. In fact there was no black pepper in sight. The chili powder more than made up for it. The salt was in a small glass dish and he noticed a mexican couple using the salt quite liberally... they were pinching it out of their dish and sprinkling it on their plates while they chatted.
As he admired their bronze complexions and beautiful smiles it occurred to him that there was really no such thing as a "mexican". Gilberto, the cab driver from the day before had explained to George that he also was an American just like George was... although not a citizen of the United States of America he did in fact live in the heart of the Americas... which stretched from Alaska to Cape Horn, Chile. He had further described the switchbacks and cliffs they were driving through as the middle of a massive and continuous chain of mountains called the American cordillera, "the spine of the world". So all these mexican hosts were really native americans; totally indigenous Americans and people whose ancestors had mixed their bloodlines with the rest of the world. If they were within the fifty states George would have called them American Indians. Gilberto had described himself as Zapoteca, his people had built pyramids in the area more than 4000 years past. This part of the world had invented corn. But Gilberto had explained that his people had not made the corn... the corn had made his people. There were many beautiful legends of the Corn Mother as Creator across the Americas... the very life and harvest cycles of corn were central to the religious beliefs and ceremonies of most indigenous American cultures. For example, he said, the Maya regarded corn as a gift from the gods and it was a sacred duty to cultivate it for them. In fact, humanity was originally fashioned from corn after the gods had tried with other materials and failed repeatedly.
This all came back to him in a flood of memory that afternoon as he smoked a cigarette after a late lunch. He had noticed a younger girl with food in a tupperware bowl that alot of "mexicans" (now he grimaced at the thought) were buying from. He asked her what she had and to his surprise she was selling iguana tomales. A leave of corn was wrapped around a paste of moist cornmeal and chunks of iguana. He had never had iguana for anything but a pet once in college. Other than some thin bones similar to one that had been in the fish taco the day before, it was tasty, especially with some of her salsa. George would taste anything once, he knew he would eat some iguana again. He was swinging lazily in a large and extremely comfortable hammock while the midday heat baked the white sand and Grandmothers hid in the shade of their tupperware bowls. It occurred to him that this was paradise. The land of eternal spring. If the bananas were not in season than the mangos were, or coconuts. He could have swam to the huge rocks near the shore and scraped mussels off their wet sides. Except for three to four months of rain each year, a pair of shorts was the only clothing needed. The only thing he really needed besides a place to keep his things was alot of water, as the heat made him sweat constantly. A five gallon jug just like the ones at office watercoolers cost him one dollar, the truck drove through town daily. Another truck drove through town daily, the driver announcing the different fruits and vegetables he had that day for sale. His voice was distorted by static and the poor quality of his ancient speakers. There were people living on the beach here that didn't even have a room for the night... they rented hammocks and slept under the stars.
The sun was falling lower in the sky and George noticed that it was likely to drop below the ocean in between the cliffs on the shore and a large rock that jutted out of the water where the waves were crashing, just offshore. He was running low on cigarettes so he began the short walk to a nearbye market. He didn't want to miss his first mexican sunset. Even though he was a tourist from the land of capitalism and corporations... he felt everything was different here. He felt it in his bones. This was going to be an indigenous sunset as opposed to the suburban ones he had enjoyed for most of his thirty years on earth. He had seen other natural sunsets... ones without power lines and jet contrails... without the eerie discolorations of the smog stained sky. He would never forget sunsets in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico where he felt so alone but empowered by the silent majesty of a days end. Here they called it la puesta. People were beginning to gather on the dunes to watch la puesta. The tiny market was at a bend in the dirt road and only had two refrigerators. They were filled with beer, Gatorade, Coca Cola, Fanta, milk and yogurt. He realized then that some corporations had established footholds wherever electricity existed. It was probably a global rule that where refrigeration existed there was Coca Cola to be bought. He opted for a yogurt, having read in his tourism guidebook that it contained live organisms that were very beneficial for digestive systems. When he was a child his parents had vacationed in Acapulco. They returned with a beautiful rainbow colored blanket with corn and a person across the center. They also came back with horror stories of the terrible diarrhea they had experienced, his father had called it Montezuma's revenge. Montezuma was an Aztec ruler who had lost his empire to Hernan Cortez 500 years past. His father had told him that the illness was a curse Montezuma placed on all invaders to his lands when his rule ended. George was certainly not looking forward to this revenge, but he supposed he deserved it... he had been raised in the strange mix of European and American cultures that had evolved in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He knew virtually nothing of the Aztecs or the Zapotecs but here he was immersed in their land and culture and loving every minute of it. Other than the money he was giving the town for food, rent and cigarrettes he was doubtful he had brought anything truly meaningful to their paradise. Yes, revenge was well deserved. George had a more practical take on the situation as well. Any germs he ingested that caused him an upset stomache he would eventually build an immunity to... so each battle would only make him stronger. He wondered if the immigrant latin american workers in Pennsylvania experienced Montezuma's revenge as well... they probably did... but for leaving, not entering the mighty rulers lands. Many of the immigrants could be found in front of Wawas and Home Depots early each morning, looking for work. There was alot of manual labor for them to do in George's suburb... high school kids nowadays were too busy to mow their own lawns let alone their neighbors. Many of the pizza shops George frequented were run entirely by latinos (he winced again at the thought, native american seemed a much more respectful term now) and most of the housecleaners, cooks and dishwashers in his area restaurants and hotels were native american also. Indigenous. With all his neighbors and friends making big money at desk jobs there was an urgent need for people that were willing to actually work with their hands.
He flipped open the bilingual dictionary that was in his black backpack. "Indigenous ~ born or engendered in, native to a land or region, especially before an intrusion, especially of plants and indigenous peoples." George decided he wasn't an indigenous american even though he was born and raised in Pennsylvania. As far back as his great-grandparents, his family were native Pennsylvanians, he knew that for sure. But William Penn wasn't even a native. His bloodline was native to European ancestors and his culture and lifestyle came from a world that was being made after an intrusion... video games and televisions, radios and cars, jet airplanes and cell-phones, microwaves and ... everything that occupied the majority of George's time. Many thousands of traditions came to the Americas for 500 years from Europe. American culture had always reflected and absorbed them all.
He had been born after the nations of Europe intruded. When Spain, France, and England claimed American land as their own it became a cultural war with everything indigenous. Here on the dirt road in the shade of a palm tree a rooster walked in front of him and he felt more indigenous... if such a feeling even existed and wasn't a delusion of his heat riddled mind. It was simply that here on the southern coast of the middle of the Americas it was apparent that European influences were still regarded as foreign. Most technological icons could be found here but they were novelties that intruded on Nature and the very natural pace of life all around George... where the ocean met the land in sheer cliffs and stunning mountains. He could probably have found a microwave somewhere close by but why would he want or need one when a man was standing at the edge of the road roasting chicken and whole white onions with a fire that he tended almost unconsciously, with a quiet pride. George wondered if chickens were a European import or natives like the wild goose, Wawa. The road rounded a bend and he noticed a hand painted sign on the huge stone cliffs to his right. "It is Illegal to kill Iguanas and you will be arrested if you do" is basically what it said. Looking above the sign he saw some movement and realized that he was looking at a wild iguana. He stepped away from the steep rocks and studied the craggy face of stone. As he smoked another cigarette he counted five iguanas spread across the cliff. He had kept one in an aquarium for two years in college, he had eaten some for lunch, this was the first time he had ever seen any that were indigenous. They were impressive. Some were 30 feet or more above the road, all were apparently comfortable in their precarious perches. They moved with the slow ease that only comes with confidence. They looked large and ancient. George wondered where the local girl had gotten her iguanas... he decided then to ask her if he ever recognized her again. He remembered she had a lazy eye and looked tired from likely walking all day.
It took him about five minutes to find a trashcan for his yogurt container, once he learned the word was la basura he was quickly accomodated. That was yet another difference between "his" world and this more indigenous one... his had alot more trash. Here most trash including toilet papers was burned near sunset... he could see a few wisps of smoke across the street as someone got rid of their own. But plastic and aluminum were not fit to burn, and so much of his Pennsylvania trash was like that. Unnatural packaging destined for land-fills. Fruit was so much simpler. After a coconut or a mango was eaten, the animals and the earth appreciated it when the remains was left to just rot naturally. Compost piles just made sense and these starving wild dogs sure loved them as well. He walked back onto the beach sand as the sun grew close to the watery horizon. It was a deeper red now and the low distant clouds were glowing purple and pink. The only people that were not staring at it were the Grandmothers who walked in his direction, hoping for a final sale before heading home for the night. A young couple walked over to him and the guy asked for a smoke. They spoke as the sun set, it turned out they were from Texas and poor... George guessed they might have been hiding out way down here in Oaxaca. They spoke of having a fire on the beach shortly, they had some fish and were going to cook it. George suggested he could hit a market and join them for dinner, they agreed. Heading back to the same mercado George could not notice any iguanas in the fading light of dusk. He thought about what to bring to the Texans fire. Some roasted onion would be nice, like he had seen in the street earlier. Some chicken would be great as well. He made a mental note to try the street vendor's pollo asado soon and compare it to the feast he was planning for that night. He should probably tip the man well for the inspiration. The onion was easy to find but he didn't see any chicken. He didn't see any meat section at all. He knew the familiar shrink wrapped meat cuts were not in either of the two refrigerators either. In his halting spanish, he asked the couple at the register if they had chicken. The man looked at the woman and she returned his questioning gaze. He looked at George and asked, "How big do you want your chicken?"
George didn't really understand the question until the man started to make sizes with the two hands in front of him. In a sickening rush of comprehension that began in his gut and ended with his humble reply, George realized that they were going to head into the backyard of the store and kill one of their chickens for him. "No thank you, just eggs and cheese please" he stammered. It almost felt as though the woman was as relieved as George was by the time he left the store.Despite the laughter of the Texans when they heard his story, the onion omelets were delicious, lacking only chili powder. Contrary to that very morning, George was glad he would awaken to roosters crowing.
He heard a flute as he sat in the open air table at a restaurant standing at the edge of Roca Blanca calle. White rock street. It wasn't an arbitrary name, or a family name.
There were no ice-cream trucks or boardwalks with caramel corn and Italian water ices, no pizza shops with huge slices for sale. No beach tags required, no cotton candy. There were grandmothers walking the beach with food for tourists and they amazed George. Despite the heat and their age they walked the entire length of the beach in long colorful skirts with huge tupperware bowls perched impossibly on the tops of their heads. After meeting a few he realized that each was carrying something entirely different than the other. One woman had a collection of hard pastries that had been baked in the nearest city. Another had peanuts and home-made candybars that looked like a box of Cracker-Jacks compressed into a solid rectangle. She explained that she had made them herself the day before. For lunch he bought three fish tacos for one U.S. dollar from a grandmother who lived one town away and explained that this was the fourth and final beach she would walk that day. Her son was a fisher and gave her the fish she had used. The red salsa she poured over them was incredible and she had made it herself. The guidebook he had been reading warned against eating local lettuce since it held alot of water that may affect digestive systems not used to the local bacterias... but George wolfed down the three tacos and loved them. He simply could not let the threat of diarreah keep him from this kind of food. It all just made so much sense. The tortillas had been made that day locally, the lettuce was grown nearbye, the salsa was homemade and the fish had been swimming in the ocean in front of him just yesterday morning. All for a price so reasonable it made him feel guilty.
A young teenage boy pushed a wheelbarrow half filled with coconuts up to him. "Coco Loco?" the boy asked and George said yes without knowing what that was... just knowing it would be neat to have a coconut like the ones hanging from trees above him. The little man grabbed a well used machete resting between two arms of the wheelbarrow and sliced a section off the top of a green coconut with four firm chops. He poured a shot of rum inside the small hole and stuck a plastic straw in it, asking for three dollars. George paid, thinking how much more work went into the fish tacos that cost so much less. The coconut milk was sweet and satisfying, he would have preferred it without the rum... which made his hot head feel even heavier in the heat. When he finished the Coco Loco a more experienced fellow tourist from Canada showed him how to split the remains open and use the original chunk of cut coconut shell to scrape the inside. He would never have realized all that fresh coconut meat was waiting in there for him... this was possibly the first edible beverage container he had ever used in his life.
The next morning he awoke to the sound of roosters crowing. At first he was able to ignore them and rest a bit more, but there were alot and they became more insistent as the morning sun crept into the sky. He began sweating too much to lie there anymore. The San Cristobal had a restaurant on the beach side of the hotel in the beach sand. He sat down at a table for two and looked over the menu. There was no way he was ordering a soda when the menu listed fresh squeezed orange, mango, pineapple and watermelon juice. The same fruits were listed as pitchers of "Licuado de" which the waiter explained was a mixture of the juice with water and sugar. He ordered what turned out to be his favorite beverage until the day he died... "Una mezcla de licuado de pina y sandia, por favor senor." It was watermelon and pineapple juice mixed with sugar water. He noticed a cup of coffee cost 10 pesos (one dollar) which was the same as it cost in Wawas from New Jersey to Virgina. He had read once that the Wawa stores were named after a small Pennsylvania town which had in turn been named after an Ojibwe (american indian) word for goose like in the poem "Song for Hiawatha"...
"All the wild-fowl sang them to him,
In the moorlands and the fen-lands,
In the melancholy marshes;
Chetowaik, the plover, sang them,
Mahng, the loon, the wild-goose, Wawa..." ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
George had learned how to enjoy coffee from Wawas in high school. Many people did, Wawa sold over 165 million cups a year. But this cup was so much better. It was pure Oaxacan beans... so sweet it reminded him of hot chocolate. Corn and coffee had lined the road to town for many miles in dry fields with patches of pale green. His pancakes were small but delicious... the waiter brought a tiny pitcher of local honey instead of maple syrup. The taste was much more delicate than the lucious molasses of tree sap. He pinched some chili powder onto his eggs then salted them with another pinch... there were no salt and pepper shakers. In fact there was no black pepper in sight. The chili powder more than made up for it. The salt was in a small glass dish and he noticed a mexican couple using the salt quite liberally... they were pinching it out of their dish and sprinkling it on their plates while they chatted.
As he admired their bronze complexions and beautiful smiles it occurred to him that there was really no such thing as a "mexican". Gilberto, the cab driver from the day before had explained to George that he also was an American just like George was... although not a citizen of the United States of America he did in fact live in the heart of the Americas... which stretched from Alaska to Cape Horn, Chile. He had further described the switchbacks and cliffs they were driving through as the middle of a massive and continuous chain of mountains called the American cordillera, "the spine of the world". So all these mexican hosts were really native americans; totally indigenous Americans and people whose ancestors had mixed their bloodlines with the rest of the world. If they were within the fifty states George would have called them American Indians. Gilberto had described himself as Zapoteca, his people had built pyramids in the area more than 4000 years past. This part of the world had invented corn. But Gilberto had explained that his people had not made the corn... the corn had made his people. There were many beautiful legends of the Corn Mother as Creator across the Americas... the very life and harvest cycles of corn were central to the religious beliefs and ceremonies of most indigenous American cultures. For example, he said, the Maya regarded corn as a gift from the gods and it was a sacred duty to cultivate it for them. In fact, humanity was originally fashioned from corn after the gods had tried with other materials and failed repeatedly.
This all came back to him in a flood of memory that afternoon as he smoked a cigarette after a late lunch. He had noticed a younger girl with food in a tupperware bowl that alot of "mexicans" (now he grimaced at the thought) were buying from. He asked her what she had and to his surprise she was selling iguana tomales. A leave of corn was wrapped around a paste of moist cornmeal and chunks of iguana. He had never had iguana for anything but a pet once in college. Other than some thin bones similar to one that had been in the fish taco the day before, it was tasty, especially with some of her salsa. George would taste anything once, he knew he would eat some iguana again. He was swinging lazily in a large and extremely comfortable hammock while the midday heat baked the white sand and Grandmothers hid in the shade of their tupperware bowls. It occurred to him that this was paradise. The land of eternal spring. If the bananas were not in season than the mangos were, or coconuts. He could have swam to the huge rocks near the shore and scraped mussels off their wet sides. Except for three to four months of rain each year, a pair of shorts was the only clothing needed. The only thing he really needed besides a place to keep his things was alot of water, as the heat made him sweat constantly. A five gallon jug just like the ones at office watercoolers cost him one dollar, the truck drove through town daily. Another truck drove through town daily, the driver announcing the different fruits and vegetables he had that day for sale. His voice was distorted by static and the poor quality of his ancient speakers. There were people living on the beach here that didn't even have a room for the night... they rented hammocks and slept under the stars.
The sun was falling lower in the sky and George noticed that it was likely to drop below the ocean in between the cliffs on the shore and a large rock that jutted out of the water where the waves were crashing, just offshore. He was running low on cigarettes so he began the short walk to a nearbye market. He didn't want to miss his first mexican sunset. Even though he was a tourist from the land of capitalism and corporations... he felt everything was different here. He felt it in his bones. This was going to be an indigenous sunset as opposed to the suburban ones he had enjoyed for most of his thirty years on earth. He had seen other natural sunsets... ones without power lines and jet contrails... without the eerie discolorations of the smog stained sky. He would never forget sunsets in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico where he felt so alone but empowered by the silent majesty of a days end. Here they called it la puesta. People were beginning to gather on the dunes to watch la puesta. The tiny market was at a bend in the dirt road and only had two refrigerators. They were filled with beer, Gatorade, Coca Cola, Fanta, milk and yogurt. He realized then that some corporations had established footholds wherever electricity existed. It was probably a global rule that where refrigeration existed there was Coca Cola to be bought. He opted for a yogurt, having read in his tourism guidebook that it contained live organisms that were very beneficial for digestive systems. When he was a child his parents had vacationed in Acapulco. They returned with a beautiful rainbow colored blanket with corn and a person across the center. They also came back with horror stories of the terrible diarrhea they had experienced, his father had called it Montezuma's revenge. Montezuma was an Aztec ruler who had lost his empire to Hernan Cortez 500 years past. His father had told him that the illness was a curse Montezuma placed on all invaders to his lands when his rule ended. George was certainly not looking forward to this revenge, but he supposed he deserved it... he had been raised in the strange mix of European and American cultures that had evolved in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He knew virtually nothing of the Aztecs or the Zapotecs but here he was immersed in their land and culture and loving every minute of it. Other than the money he was giving the town for food, rent and cigarrettes he was doubtful he had brought anything truly meaningful to their paradise. Yes, revenge was well deserved. George had a more practical take on the situation as well. Any germs he ingested that caused him an upset stomache he would eventually build an immunity to... so each battle would only make him stronger. He wondered if the immigrant latin american workers in Pennsylvania experienced Montezuma's revenge as well... they probably did... but for leaving, not entering the mighty rulers lands. Many of the immigrants could be found in front of Wawas and Home Depots early each morning, looking for work. There was alot of manual labor for them to do in George's suburb... high school kids nowadays were too busy to mow their own lawns let alone their neighbors. Many of the pizza shops George frequented were run entirely by latinos (he winced again at the thought, native american seemed a much more respectful term now) and most of the housecleaners, cooks and dishwashers in his area restaurants and hotels were native american also. Indigenous. With all his neighbors and friends making big money at desk jobs there was an urgent need for people that were willing to actually work with their hands.
He flipped open the bilingual dictionary that was in his black backpack. "Indigenous ~ born or engendered in, native to a land or region, especially before an intrusion, especially of plants and indigenous peoples." George decided he wasn't an indigenous american even though he was born and raised in Pennsylvania. As far back as his great-grandparents, his family were native Pennsylvanians, he knew that for sure. But William Penn wasn't even a native. His bloodline was native to European ancestors and his culture and lifestyle came from a world that was being made after an intrusion... video games and televisions, radios and cars, jet airplanes and cell-phones, microwaves and ... everything that occupied the majority of George's time. Many thousands of traditions came to the Americas for 500 years from Europe. American culture had always reflected and absorbed them all.
He had been born after the nations of Europe intruded. When Spain, France, and England claimed American land as their own it became a cultural war with everything indigenous. Here on the dirt road in the shade of a palm tree a rooster walked in front of him and he felt more indigenous... if such a feeling even existed and wasn't a delusion of his heat riddled mind. It was simply that here on the southern coast of the middle of the Americas it was apparent that European influences were still regarded as foreign. Most technological icons could be found here but they were novelties that intruded on Nature and the very natural pace of life all around George... where the ocean met the land in sheer cliffs and stunning mountains. He could probably have found a microwave somewhere close by but why would he want or need one when a man was standing at the edge of the road roasting chicken and whole white onions with a fire that he tended almost unconsciously, with a quiet pride. George wondered if chickens were a European import or natives like the wild goose, Wawa. The road rounded a bend and he noticed a hand painted sign on the huge stone cliffs to his right. "It is Illegal to kill Iguanas and you will be arrested if you do" is basically what it said. Looking above the sign he saw some movement and realized that he was looking at a wild iguana. He stepped away from the steep rocks and studied the craggy face of stone. As he smoked another cigarette he counted five iguanas spread across the cliff. He had kept one in an aquarium for two years in college, he had eaten some for lunch, this was the first time he had ever seen any that were indigenous. They were impressive. Some were 30 feet or more above the road, all were apparently comfortable in their precarious perches. They moved with the slow ease that only comes with confidence. They looked large and ancient. George wondered where the local girl had gotten her iguanas... he decided then to ask her if he ever recognized her again. He remembered she had a lazy eye and looked tired from likely walking all day.
It took him about five minutes to find a trashcan for his yogurt container, once he learned the word was la basura he was quickly accomodated. That was yet another difference between "his" world and this more indigenous one... his had alot more trash. Here most trash including toilet papers was burned near sunset... he could see a few wisps of smoke across the street as someone got rid of their own. But plastic and aluminum were not fit to burn, and so much of his Pennsylvania trash was like that. Unnatural packaging destined for land-fills. Fruit was so much simpler. After a coconut or a mango was eaten, the animals and the earth appreciated it when the remains was left to just rot naturally. Compost piles just made sense and these starving wild dogs sure loved them as well. He walked back onto the beach sand as the sun grew close to the watery horizon. It was a deeper red now and the low distant clouds were glowing purple and pink. The only people that were not staring at it were the Grandmothers who walked in his direction, hoping for a final sale before heading home for the night. A young couple walked over to him and the guy asked for a smoke. They spoke as the sun set, it turned out they were from Texas and poor... George guessed they might have been hiding out way down here in Oaxaca. They spoke of having a fire on the beach shortly, they had some fish and were going to cook it. George suggested he could hit a market and join them for dinner, they agreed. Heading back to the same mercado George could not notice any iguanas in the fading light of dusk. He thought about what to bring to the Texans fire. Some roasted onion would be nice, like he had seen in the street earlier. Some chicken would be great as well. He made a mental note to try the street vendor's pollo asado soon and compare it to the feast he was planning for that night. He should probably tip the man well for the inspiration. The onion was easy to find but he didn't see any chicken. He didn't see any meat section at all. He knew the familiar shrink wrapped meat cuts were not in either of the two refrigerators either. In his halting spanish, he asked the couple at the register if they had chicken. The man looked at the woman and she returned his questioning gaze. He looked at George and asked, "How big do you want your chicken?"
George didn't really understand the question until the man started to make sizes with the two hands in front of him. In a sickening rush of comprehension that began in his gut and ended with his humble reply, George realized that they were going to head into the backyard of the store and kill one of their chickens for him. "No thank you, just eggs and cheese please" he stammered. It almost felt as though the woman was as relieved as George was by the time he left the store.Despite the laughter of the Texans when they heard his story, the onion omelets were delicious, lacking only chili powder. Contrary to that very morning, George was glad he would awaken to roosters crowing.
He heard a flute as he sat in the open air table at a restaurant standing at the edge of Roca Blanca calle. White rock street. It wasn't an arbitrary name, or a family name.
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