"Fishin'?" Or the Pleasures of Loutdom

You know the old one about the good ole boy who takes the city slicker out fishing for catfish one hot afternoon. The slicker's one of these sticklers, and has noticed that the boy has an inspection sticker from 1999 and don't bother with his seat belt even when he's hitting 50 on a gravel road. There's no shoulder, and the dust is chasing them down the road, and the green green leaves are whizzing past and it's about then that the boy passes over a fruit jar and sort of orders stickler to "look at the bead on that, and then giver a swash."

When they get to a clearing beside the sleepy river, there's a few other trucks already parked there, and they haul the skiff out of the back of the truck and clamber in. And there ain't no life vests, and the boy's got a greasy brown paper bag with him, which the slicker figures is some kind of pork sandwiches Daisy Mae whipped up for them back at the double wide, before she went off to her swing shift at the rubber thread plant. So the slicker's surprised yet again when the boy pulls out a stick of dynamite.

"What the hell? You can't do that, that's illegal."

The boy lights the fuse and passes the stick over. "You talkin' or fishin'?"

He might have continued along the lines of "if you're talking, talk civil now." I guess the slicker would say "yes sir, sir."

There are times in history when people feel nearly omnipotent. It may be that in 1930 the generals who ran Japan felt that way. Japan at that time had by far the best military in Asia, which was pretty much the world as far as Japan saw it. China was a broken country, a true pitiful helpless giant. India was still a colonial conquest of the British, who were nearly bled white from World War I and were being hectored by Gandhi’s independence movement. On the far far side of the Pacific was a United States deep in depression, with only an outpost here and there, a few soldiers in spats enjoying life in the tropics. Europe had its own issues, and Japan had defeated Russia in 1905. It was, to the Japanese leaders, an historic moment. If they waited, things might change in ways that would enhance the inherent weaknesses of their position--they were what they were, an island nation with no oil. But they were a disciplined people. It was the moment to use their strengths, the moment to act.

an original kamikaze headband, pic from http://www.antiqueswords.com/bq973.htm

The lessons of World War II were once written across the sky, so large that everyone agreed with them: we cannot go there again. There was opportunity aplenty for new paths. These brilliant lessons have sadly faded, melted away as clouds will. Now it is the United States who is lead by people who believe we are at the historic moment. They have struck, and striking have a new argument: "you fishin' or talking?" We have, supposedly, a military power sufficient to "take out" any threat at its inception. This is the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive war, enunciated in the moment after 9/11, when the world supposedly changed, when a frightened Congress allowed this Administration to declare a permanent state of war, which now grounds its argument that it can pretty much abide by or ignore whatever laws it wants to.

It will only be with a change in the party that controls Congress that there comes a possibility of change in this amazing state of affairs, assuming that it is even possible to make such a change in Congress. It is quite possible that no change is even possible, and that even in 2008 we will be offered a choice which does not include change. Consider that in 1968 America could choose between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. The real embodiment of choice with which 1968 started so grandly--Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, even Eugene McCarthy--mysteriously evaporated by convention time. Richard Nixon, let us recall, was the "peace candidate."

Our world contains, and will always contain, the Existential Problem. It is the problem of "Are you talkin' or fishin'?" World War II did end. The Japanese discovered that the world had a bigger stick of dynamite. They suffered an ocean of misery bigger than the blue Pacific, and their grandchildren play video games in Tokyo. We only ask whether these tidal waves of misery are historical necessities, or whether we might avoid the next one, the one that seems poised to crash over our own heads and the heads of our children. To put it in a "civil" fashion. I mean, I'm not wearing a tee shirt at the dance or nothing.

--Bill Hicks

Half Right

I was going into Bojangles the other day to get my favorite sausage and gravy biscuit breakfast, sporting my "Heckofa Job Brownie" sticker, which I feel like strikes a blow for freedom and exempts me from having to give any money to the Democratic Party as long as they keep talking about how they'll run the war better than the repubs, and a young guy in a dusty black SUV followed me into the lot close enough that I hoped he was reading my sticker. He parks closer to the door than I do, and he and his lady friend are inside by the time I walk by his truck and see his yellow ribbon on the back. I'm close enough to read it, and I do. It says "Bring the Troops Home and Station them on the Mexican Border."

Well. Have to say there was a bit of pleasure in the read, because it suggests a fissure in the monolith. Tactically, it'd be just peachy if half the repubs started chanting that line. And I'd rather, given such a grim, negative choice, that we line 'em up down in Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, behind the partition our fine House of Representatives has moved to erect, than to read these headlines every day: 3 LeJeune Marines Killed in Roadside Bombing. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Damn, do we remember nothing at all? Oh right, these kids we're killing today in the machine weren't born back in Country Joe's day. The song went like this: "what are we fighting for, we don't give a damn, we're going to Vietnam..."

About that wall, by the way. I suggest we hire Christo as the lead architect/engineer for that project. Christo has worked on a number of similar projects all over the world, with amazing success and with a much smaller budget than we can offer him. I'm sure he'll come up with the best materials list, but I would suggest he use taffeta, since it's a wall that runs through the Texas South, and through John Ford country as well. Taffeta is sturdy yet can billow and flow in an eye-pleasing way--just think of the wonderful ballroom scenes in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." Damn if it don't all come around. Where's my headsmack key??

I digress. I went on in and had my breakfast. From inside Bo's I could read the little license plate on the front of the kid's SUV. It said "Fireman." Nice. There happen to be quite a lot of Mexicans living in my town, his town. They work at the chicken plants mostly, and their kids have managed to win the first state championship in soccer that our high school has ever won, beating much bigger schools all over the state. I'm sure if this boy fireman wants a side job at the chicken plant, they'll be happy to give him one, probably start him higher than any Mexican and give him a lead job on the head choppin' line. He don't want that job though. Somebody just told him to stew about these "illegal" people coming up here and changing things, and he got his ass in a sling. It was easy. It's what people do, a human trait I'm afraid. We all love to get our asses in slings.

I saw a little video last night, a narration by a Polish woman of her own trail of tears in World War II. Don't think the Germans invented forced marches, or the Japanese either. We did that, and the guy who's on our $20 gave the orders. Anyway, this woman lived in a little town on the west side of Poland and spoke German as well as Polish. She was Jewish. One day, just before school started, the Germans arrived. She was 15. School never started. By Christmas she and her parents were living in their own basement, in the cold and dark, while other folks were living upstairs, in their house. Her 19-year-old brother had been hauled off in a truck, never to be heard from again. The next summer her dad was hauled off, then she and her mother. The two of them were separated by soldiers, and she was literally tossed into a truck and taken to a factory where she made uniforms for German soldiers and shoveled coal out of coal cars till she was so exhausted that she considered jumping under the next train. In the winter of 1945, while the US Army was pushing the German Army back after their last gasp attack at the Battle of the Bulge, she and several thousand other girls were forced marched from Poland into Czechoslovakia, most of them dying or being shot along the way. She survived, she related in the movie, because the day before her dad was hauled away to his death he told her, ordered her, to wear her ski boots. Many of the girls on the march, all through the eastern European winter, wore only sandals. When she was liberated by an American soldier (whom she later married), she weighed 68 pounds.*

Lots of people nowadays want to tell you this kind of stuff didn't happen. It's not so hard to just tell them they're idiots. The boy fireman, that's a little more subtle. He's going numb though, he's in serious trouble. Already he can't feel how a Mexican person feels reading that sticker. Maybe it's a Mexican who walked across the Sonora desert to get here to get that $5 an hour chicken-choking gig. Maybe a Mexican who lost his little sister along the way, who knows. Or a guy who rode in a locked up cattle truck for two days and nearly smothered. So the kid wants to save people, he has this fine altruistic nature that led him to volunteer to be a fireman. But his dark side is coming out too, for whatever reason, and he doesn't even realize it. Right now he can be ok with hurt eyes. Maybe before long he'll be ok with worse. This is the trajectory for many of the kids we're sticking over in Iraq, too. They'll never be ok again, some of them, and some of them will come back and blame the Mexicans. And some of them are the Mexicans.

It makes me wonder if the problem we have goes to some level much deeper than we realize, to something that lets us accept every choice that's grounded in efficiency. That's what happened to the Germans. Once we turn off the ability to feel those hurt eyes, we can start rolling. And we don't even get the weird, contradictory rules we end up establishing along the way. Little starving Jewish girls sewing the German soldiers uniforms. Big companies offering endless nasty, low-wage jobs to Mexicans, who then get Catch-22ed with "but you're illegal," while their kids do us proud by bringing home the state championship.

It's like the old joke. Down in Mississippi, back in the mid-'60s, Lyndon Johnson finally made the powers-that-be allow black people to get a driver's license. This got the modern Republican Party started, but that's another story. Anyway, this guy did get his license, after having to solve ten pages of calculus problems in five minutes (and that's how we got those crackers to the moon and back, but that's another story). So he's driving down Main Street in Meridian or somewheres, and he's going about 23 but the sign says 20, so he's busted. Well, they have to make an example. They knew it wasn't going to work. So after a trial he's hauled over to Ole Miss Stadium and buried up to his neck on the 50-yard line. The stadium's plumb full of crackers. Down at one end, under the goal posts, the black man sees a big cage. In it is a lion. A big fat sheriff walks over there and opens the door to that cage, and the lion comes out. It looks around, and then it sees that black head, up at the 50-yard line, and it takes off running. The guy's eyes are glued to the lion, growing bigger and bigger, drooling in anticipation, and the lion's so hungry that he actually overshoots the mark a bit and finds himself standing over the buried head. The crowd was screaming, but has fallen silent. The black man does the only thing he can do. He cranes his neck and reaches up and bites that lion as hard as he can on the balls.

A hush falls over the assembled. Then from the back, a lone voice, maybe some kid fireman, who knows, calls out: "Play fair, Nigger."

--Bill Hicks

Final note...Maybe you think I'm being a tad unfair to the great state of Mississippi. Surely they would never subject a black citizen to such punishment just to "make an example." If you have such thoughts, please read the following from the Clarion Ledger, December 31, 2005. My compliments to Dave Niewart for digging this one out.

*"One Survivor Remembers," HBO Films, the story of Gerda Weissmann Klein, narrated by her, 1995 Academy Award, best documentary short film

Tensile

We're glimpsing the divide
These Christmas days of '05
Watching children freeze to death
In Pakistan, where their world collapsed
Just like the Anasazi, I imagine
Watching the Colorado trickle mud, and
Climbing out a long goodbye to their beautiful
Rocks. The criminal agriculture
As tempting as the nicest deep sweet hit,
Foots poetry and music and all art
If not pure love itself--that would be too cruel.

And the fearful tribal leader on the screen
Hands jerking, makes his case for what he does
Protecting us all from some barbarian's suicide attack
By sprinkles of bitter secret indiscretions:
Better some Arabian pain, or yours, than
Some jerked on blue dress, to come down to it.

And all for a bit more time, to sing a song
To poetize or watch the NFL or buy a new doodah
While the Yankee Dollah still has
Meaning. Because the polar bears are
Drowning even as we natter on and on,
As brave as Himalayan children with their feet in rags.
Yet have you noticed that the apples
Are as beautiful as they have ever been.
How is it possible? Only whisper that seditious question
As we are informed: they listen.

--Bill Hicks, 12/21/05 (photo courtesy of www.terhuneorchards.com)

Seasons Greetings and Happy Holidays

It's no wonder the Administration wanders lost in the desert as this world creaks towards 2006, when the guy who's third in line to be President, the Right Honorable Denny Hastert, R of Illinois, has made a stand about calling this year's Capitol tree a by gawd Christmas Tree rather than, say, a Holiday Tree, or whatever else people might decide to call the poor dead sacrifice to the gods of winter. Hey, I'm fine with "Christmas Tree." Libby and I are going out to the old pasture this week, and I'll crank the Poulan up and saw down a little seven foot cedar, just like we did last year. Then we'll get out the lights and the stand and the shiny balls and stuff and decorate her up, and put some presents underneath, and sit by the wood stove and sip some scotch and some eggnog. We'll also watch some football, and some videos, go to Jim Watson's Cave Christmas show (20th year I think it is Watson has played this gig), drive over to see the folks, look at Orion the Hunter climb up over the horizon from the East. It's a Christmas Tree to us. We live in the woods, and I'll even go out and put some Christmas balls on the trees here and there, where you might spot them driving down the driveway. Last year I started decorating the pole where we had a mailbox till the kids knocked the box off with a bat or something one too many times. Now it's just the pole with our number on it. So we have a Christmas Tree and a Christmas woods and a Christmas Pole.

I just don't get what the big deal is with all this hullabaloo about how there's some sort of "liberal attack" on Christmas. Is this a religious worry? It sounds like it. It sounds like another one of these deals like the "homosexual agenda's attack on marriage" which is just confounding groups like Focus on the Family and our President. Forget that a marriage is a very singular thing, and that what someone else does with theirs doesn't affect in the least what Libby and I do with ours. It's also a bit like the Prayer in the Schools deal. No one has banned prayer in the schools. Anyone can pray anytime they want. I hope they do. So fine if Denny Hastert passes a resolution that the big dead tree out there in the rotunda is a Christmas Tree. We already knew that. It's also a Holiday Tree. Christmas is a holiday after all. Some people go to work on holidays, by the way. That's the deal with holidays, you can't make someone have a holiday, because then it wouldn't exactly be a holiday would it?

And on the other hand, there ain't no Christmas Tree in the Bible, nowhere. Also, Jesus wasn't born on December 25th. The early Christians were living in a world where there were plenty of religious holidays and celebrations, and they thought that on the one hand, if they celebrated what they wanted to celebrate on some of these same existing holidays, well maybe people who thought they were a pain might just not notice them and leave them alone. And on the other hand, they also thought that if they mixed some of the old religion in with their new religion, well maybe some of the other folks might join up with them.

So for example, when the Norse people sacrificed an evergreen tree every year to the god of winter, a kind of gift to insure that spring would eventually come again, well that looked good to the Christians and so they started putting up trees in their huts too. And maybe they figured a little insurance with the god of winter might actually help too. Couldn't hurt, could it?

So now it's a Christmas Tree. There's the other thing people say too--that the gift deal, that paroxysm of spending we go through every year (the present Walmart is eagerly awaiting)--these gifts all symbolize the gift humanity got in Jesus. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son..." And the Wise Men did bring gifts, didn't they? Maybe the crucifixion is symbolized in the sacrifice of each tree, except when you start talking about "symbolizing" aren't you getting away from the other thing about these right wing worriers, which is their dogma of literalism in all things biblical? I mean I like the poetry of the biblical dialectic: we start off in the way early mythic days with Abraham almost sacrificing his son, then we expand that idea to where Father God actually does sacrifice his son, and finally we come to the present moment, where we all symbolically sacrifice trees. And then spring comes again! The Jehovah's Witnesses, on the other hand, just watch all this sparkly stuff and shake their heads and do not participate. It might piss Walmart off, but there's some real integrity in that, and they're not getting on me for having a Christmas Pole.

These days we're all seeing ads for some mighty big gifts. I'm thinking of the pretty silver cars with gigantic ribbons on them, or the red tag guy turned into a ribbon. Maybe we're still trying to insure that the sun will come back. Give your baby a convertible. But if we look a little deeper, it's all those cars that are insuring that one of these days it's never going to get cold enough to kill the first skeeter. How's that for a strange twist. That old Norse tree thing may end up contributing to a shopping spree that turns off the Gulf Stream and chills out Northern Europe to the temperature of Siberia. Meanwhile, the nearest beach to where I live will move some 100 miles inland, and we'll have to keep that ragtop rolled up just to keep our heads from mutating into carcinomic splendor. Some places spring won't leave; others it won't come back.

Maybe this year I'll have one extra splash to bring in '06. We might get some more intelligent folks into the Congress in '06, and who knows what might happen once that happens. Gawd knows the Republican winter has got to break soon, doesn't it? Happy Holidays.

--Bill Hicks