JUST ANOTHER WORDY TANTRUM ABOUT IDIOTS
I've been trying to write songs about this whole attack thing, because that's what I do, I write songs. But everything's come out sounding like Eve Of Destruction, all breathless, listy, hamhanded and out of touch, picked clean of context. Instead, I've been ranting a lot, semicoherent flushings, trying to make sense of what-all is happening, both in the world and (way more importantly) in my own life.

Since the eleventh, I have, a bit more than usual, let my verborrhea go absolutely haywire, just pull the Romilar-tested gonzo-approved Lester Bangs trick of closing your eyes and letting the words spill out onto the page like some Niagara torrent, like the sentence ain't never gonna end now that it's begun, like there's no end that's even possible, Inna-gadda-de-ramble, Freeverse. (Counterproductive? Sure. But at least I feel better afterwards.) (Draw sexual metaphors from this paragraph at your own risk.)

You can bitch about what someone's saying, but how they say it is a little tricky. If you can get past function and get yourself a clear shot at someone's form, then either something is really shot to hell with their MO or you're Kael or Ebert or, um, Kakutani? Whatever.

Take Rush Limbaugh, for example. (Rush, to me, is like KFC: there's times when you might actually want to try it just to find out if it still tastes terrible, that salty lardy smell they blow out into the street draws you in, like you know it's gonna make you queasy but just a dose of it would get the inexplicable desire for it out of your system, but then you get some and to your absolute surprise, Hey! It's even worse than your tastebuds imagine, it's scary and a little dangerous and it fucks you up inside just a little bit and it takes days of clean living to get your inner workings back in order. But then, a few years later, you forget, and it all happens again.)

Anyway, Limbaugh. That ugly fascist prick has less sense than a bag of hammers, and talk about someone who won't shut up. I imagine Howard Stern without his eight hundred stripper friends and dirty double-entendre cronies, just by himself, getting all morose and ranty for three hours a day. No one deserves that much airtime in front of that many million people. No one. Not on any side of the political game board, not anywhere. The fact that that sanctimonious self-worshiping small-minded fuck is the most listened-to man in America can be directly tied to why the rest of the world thinks we're a bunch of blowhard closed-minded shits. Because, well, we are, and he's our doughy addle-pated spokesman with that most dangerous of things, a bully pulpit and a carefully cultivated army of lobotomized worker ants who ditto his every vindictive, bilious utterance as if it was broadcast directly from the Mount.

I refuse to believe that these people are our future. The fact that this militaristic, scared minority (and god, please let them be a minority) of self-important assholes among us are isolating us (all of us in North America and maybe Europe too) from the rest of the world, taunting and goading all these people who not only have a legitimate gripe about how the USA throws its weight around, but they have literally nothing to lose and a one-way ticket to paradise for wiping us out, even if it means wiping themselves out, scares me as a human being more than anything.

And these self-appointed ignorant hawks don't even have a clue. They just keep giving each other patronage gigs, boinking each other's interns, drinking up their expense accounts and driving their Ford Explorers over curbs and into each other like the highways are some video game, with the AC jacked up to arctic and some angry white fratboy thrashy fagbasher band on with the boomp bass turned way crunch up boomp, seething inwardly and outwardly about how they're being put upon, messed with, screwed over and otherwise inconvenienced by all the other peoples of the world. You wish, jackass.

The Maaaan isn't keeping you down, holmes, and neither are the foreigners, the liberals, the ACLU, Bill Gates, the taxmen, anarchists, the homeless, the hippies, the porn industry, the Taliban, Montel Williams, the intellectuals, the queers, the po-lice, the Clintons, welfare mothers, Hollywood, baby boomers or P. Diddy and the Bad Boy Posse.

Wrong machine, kids. Point your rage somewhere else. You're not the victim of the problem. Actually, by not thinking about this crap you are the problem. It ain't hopeless, but you gotta stop being ignorant.

This is no time to stay under a rock and wait for the whole war thing to pan out. It's going to pan out on our heads, I don't know if y'all noticed, and dammit we'd better get used to the fact that it's a round planet, and if something can blow up over there, then something can and will blow up over here. It's a goddamned miracle that no one's flown a plane into a building before this, and the fact that everyone's comparing WTC to Pearl Harbor, well the fact that we've been the undisputed heavyweight champeen of Island Earth for going on 60 years now and we've not been hit like this more often is kind of a miracle.

People blow each other up all over the world, all the time. And nothing we do now is going to change that. Especially if what we do now is blow up more cities and make more enemies.

Look. I don't have answers, and I'm not an elected official, and this column is syndicated only between the end of my fingers and your eyeballs, so I'm aware of my influence. But there has got to be another way to go about this. Even our lawd-protectors Congress themselves keep saying that this "war" is going to be different than any other war ever fought. Ah, yep. I agree. The Mighty American Empire is in real danger of getting their asses kicked by a pocket group of medievalists with slingshots, a different version of the same bible that the Christians use, and nothing to lose. This little set-to, if it goes they way they're all saying, is gonna be so messy it's going to make Vietnam look like, well, like the Gulf War.

And some corporations are going to get filthy rich off it.

And me, I feel a little helpless right now. All I can do is lash out and throw tantrums like this one, read other people's thoughts on the matter (be they more popular or less mainstream) and hope a conclusion presents itself.