As one of the "leftists" that Holly is screaming about, I feel the need to say a word or two. I think it's funny to begin with the line that if Bush is reelected there may end up being only one party, because I feel that there currently is only one party, it just poses as two (call them evil-dum and evil-dee). Both serving the same interests with the same agenda towards the same ultimate ends. A little history is needed also. Our country may not be a parliamentary system but there is nothing in our Constitution saying it has to be a two-party system (there's actually nothing about parties at all). In fact in the beginning there was basically one party (the Federalists). Jefferson helped establish the Republicans (not the current-day variety) in response to the Federalist's closeness to big business and in an effort to bring about democratic reform. I think if he were here today he would be doing the same in trying to promote a (third) party whose interests lie with the people instead of the corporations. And while I don't agree that we are founded on the principles of "entrenched binaries" I will admit that these binaries (north/south, slave-holding/abolitionist, urban/rural) have definately influenced and sustained the two-party system as we know it. Yet I think that most of these binaries are not the prevalent forces they once were. The topics of today are simply too complex to be rendered into a binary form. And more importantly, the systems we have now don't seem to operate on this principle. Seems like there was a clear binary decision in attacking Iraq, yet both sides of the equation went the same way. A law was just passed labelling an unborn fetus a victim, substanially hindering years of choice activism, where were our champions of polar forces? My main point is that our two parties have grown so close as to be virtually indistinguishable on numerous issues and a third party is one way that we could at least get alternatives into the discussion.

My basic problem is I don't see an end to this teeter-totter of bad to worse and back again. I guess I have to accept the fistfight in the alley cause I honestly can't think of many policy changes that Kerry will enact that will be much different than Bush. Will he pull our troops from Iraq or give over power to the UN? no. Will he pass major corporate reform laws? no. Will he provide health care to all Americans or just make-up some bullshit Medicare 'reform' like Bush? Will he codify civil-unions for same-sex couples? no. Will he find jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans? WIll he honestly enact tax reforms that benefit you and I and not the corporations and the rich? He hasn't convinced me on any of these issues that he is a better choice than Bush.

I am also just annoyed that I am no longer supposed to vote for the candidate whose vision of America is like mine, but rather one who is slightly better than the other. It's so undemocratic. Why even pretend to have a democracy anymore? Since polls were brought up, the over-riding reason people give when asked why they are voting for Kerry is to get Bush out. That is just not right. It's disgusting. The fact that our democracy is in such a shambles that any old rich fucker with a Democrat pin is gonna get half of the country's vote just because he is wearing that pin and not because anyone gives a damn what he stands for is simply appalling. In my opinion a country whose vision of democracy is so off-kilter and so in the hands of big-money and corporations deserves to have Bush for another 4 years. Perhaps he is what we need for people to get their heads out of their asses and to start to think about actual issues and not so much what party they belong to (it had to get that bad before Spain was able to elect a true reform candidate). I also think the threat of Nazimerica is ill-conceived. The idea that we need to sacrifice democracy in order to fend off fascism is rather disinge
nu
ou
s. How are we rejecting fascism by restricing our democratic freedom? It seems more fascist to have elections with only pre-chosen candidates. It's along the same lines that we need to sacrifice our personal freedom and civil liberties in order to have security from our enemies. So, until the democratic party can offer a candidate that represents true change (which was offered in the forms of Kucinich and Mosley-Braun, but again rejected because of 'electability' issues) they aren't getting my vote (unless I suppose the field has been narrowed to its "proper" binary dimensions come election time).

They came home "rejoicing" over "fragrant bohea [tea] for themselves, plug tobacco for their husbands, flashy calico for their children, gay ribbons for the girls, jack-knives for the boys, crockery for the cupboard, and snuff for 'Grannie.'"

-an excerpt from an autobiography published in 1884. It demonstrates one of the market's first excursions into rural America. Today we take for granted that we 'need' certain commercial objects. One of capitalism's first motives involved creating wants, which hopefully transcended to 'needs.' Consumerism is impossible when people are happy with what they have, and in the 1820s subsistence farming gave most families everything they needed, the basics of survival to the comforts of company and association. The market realized from early on that these needs had to be replaced with fabriacted ones. Even though many farm families were perfectly content before the market invasion, as soon as Mr. Smith down the road had bought fancy calico and crockery manly patriarchal pride made anything less for one's own family out of the question. It makes sense in that so much of communal farming was based on the relationships between neighbors, and anything that brought this tenuous balance out of line was a cause for concern. Thus families worked a little bit harder so they could have these new necessities. At first it was just an extra cash-crop of wheat or cotton, but as the availability of ever-more exotic merchandise increased, so to did the price of these items. Families that at one point could comfortably subsist were forced to work harder to gain these modern contrivances. Eventually it wasn't enough to have an extra crop or two, farmers were forced through the entrance of the market and its related concerns (including higher property taxation: after all the roads need to be built and protected to bring the merchandise) to find more ways to realize the goal of capital. Where once cultivation of one's land produced everything necessary, now there were new things to be had and higher prices to be paid. Many faced choices between buying slaves to increase production or mortgaging the farm to get money.

The concept of money was foreign, alien, and unnatural to many farmers. For years they had simply had no need for it. The idea that one's labor could be exchanged for a bit of gold or paper notes was inconceivable. You can't eat it, make clothes from it, and the heat you get from burning it is certainly not worth it. But the new merchants wouldn't except their extra foodstuffs. For decades it was natural that you would trade once a year or so an extra cow or abundant crop for a tool or bauble that was not otherwise obtainable. Now the merchants wouldn't take it, they wanted specie, money. This concept is at the core of how America was forcibly catapulted into the market revolution. The desires were built, the money was made available (if at extroadinary cost), and the roads were paved with the blood (taxes) of the farmers. And, I guess today is just a hop skip or leap from then. Of course we have a pretty perfected system now. Barely anyone has any relation to their own survival. But, the basic tenets are the same: create want, make commodities available, and make the money (still at pretty extroadinary cost), the rest, as they say, is cake.

So I'm getting most of this from a book. The Market Revolution by Charles Sellers. It's one of the first real history books I've read for pleasure and I am enjoying it more than I would have thought. You can't understand the present without a grasp of the past. Nothing makes sense in a void. And our current situation is hardly a void. It is a totally foreseeable consequence of choices made by generations of men (and yes they're almost all men) bent on changing the nature of how people lived their lives. So far their vision has been realized in extents I am sure they could never have dreamed of. I wonder if they could see it wha
t
th
ey would think and if they would have made the same choices. In any event I have to reccomend history. Yes, a pretty broad statement. But from one who never thought he was interested, it bears a second glance. I will probably post more pertinent tidbits as I traverse the rocky terrain of the market. Stay tuned...

...and please: try to get grannie off the snuff!

So Bush now makes jokes about the search for WMDs in Iraq. At campaign dinners and such he has this routine with pictures of him looking out the white house window and other places, hahaha, where are those pesky weapons? Is this funny to anybody? At the least for a couple hundreds of families whose children arrived home in bodybags it is unequivocally rage-evoking. yuk

The artbomb is alive, but only for the future!

After typing them I realized the first is much stranger and interesting than the second, so if you don't have all day just read that one.

I'm in some kind of restaraunt or hotel with friends. I have to use the bathroom, so I search around (for a very long time, this is one damned hidden-away john) and eventually find the door. I go in and am in a locker-room type of room with various rows of showers/urinals/etc. Well I look for the place to pee and can't find it. None of the objects quite seem right. Everything is very archaic looking. I am standing in front of what I've decided look most like urinals (but which in fact resemble half-size showers) when a man tells me to go ahead and pee. So I climb in and start to pee in the direction I hope is right and the man pulls out this firehose and starts laying it on me. I am slightly surprised but follow his directions to turn atound and move this way and that as he sprays full force. Well eventually we are outside and he's still beaming me with this high-powered spray and then there's another guy there who starts playing in the snow (yeah there's snow on the ground and I'm not even feeling particularly wet). Well the other guy gets this icicle and gives it to the first who puts it through the zipper of his pants (the water spraying has stopped somewhere in the interim). The first guy tells the other to "go down" and then sprinkles a bunch of cocaine on the icicle extruding from his pants. The guy starts lapping it up (not snorting it at all) and I ask if I can have some and the guy says something like we don't know each other well enough and I ask if I can just have what he spilled all over his pants and shoes (there're big piles cause he was so sloppy). He says sure and I try but blow it all away.

<real life pee break>

I'm in a little village in what must be Italy. I'm with assorted musical colleagues from different parts of my life. We're on some kind of tour I suppose (though I'm not sure casue everything happened in this one place). We're all sitting on the side of a small windy road. There's a fence that I sit on a bunch. Generally everyone is just milling about socializing and such. I keep hanging out with groups of mostly guys, shooting the shit. The weird thing was that everytime I stood still I was touching some guy or other, not sexually at all just familiarly. Like I'm straddling the fence and I have my arms wrapped under the guy in front of me's pits and am holding on to his chest. I kept wondering if it was weird and no one seemed to care (or really even notice) at all. Well I'm roving around talking to people and such. I remember me in a group of four or six people and this guy's talking to everyone about this guy who made his own viola, and another guy is like, "he didn't make his own blah-blah (some term for a part in the top of the instrument which I don't think I really know), did he". And the other guy like "oh yeah" and I asked if everyone here was in the orchestra. Whatever. Then there was this girl from Germany we were talking to and she had a funny accent and Paul came over and asked if she was German, and I looked at her and said, in German, "that is german isn't it?" and she said yes but that she was from the west or something. She had what sounded almost like a lisp. Oh yeah, it was very foggy the whole time, I remember asking her about the nebel (fog) and she said it was a shame cause right over the mountains you could see the Himalayans (whoah just realized my stupid dream-self got the Alps and Himalayans confused-hah). Anyways it's a little later and my whole family is there (immediate plus my grandparents on my dad's side) to visit me or something, and I keep running around giving them all hugs and stuff. At one point I grab my grandma in a big hug and lift her from the ground and she says "you always acted so young," but like she meant it in a good way with a smile. Well the fo
g
li
fts and we look up to see a huge mountain and I ask this guy who is oddly familiar to me (though he looks kinda like Holly's Rodrigo) if those are the Himalayans, and he says no it's actually in the way of them, people are always complaining that if it weren't for that mountain they would have a great view. My family and I decide to go see them, so we go down the road to where they've parked their SUV and grandpa's already at the wheel. <I wake>

we's goin out to da movies to see a big fat black lady. They are my favorite kinda movies, ones with fatly funny black women who slap people. Paul this is your official notice since you aint home yet. Today is just beautiful. I walked in the rain for awhile. Oh gift from heaven. Only wored my greenie and nuthin else. So sweet. Maybe tonight sumthin special goan hapin. Matt's gotta new bike!

the flowers that is. just saw a whole pack of flowers deburrowing themselves from winter's cold grasp. Very exciting. Is spring really here? Sure hope so. I am ready to toss my melancholy aside for abounding hope and joy. I wanna ride and ride and ride. For hours. Languishing in the sun. I tried to languish a but today and then it started raining. Hard to languish when you're wet. But, the door is open. The out is flowing in. Reviving the spirit and giving me back some moisture too. Please stay away winter, we've had enough time to play.

Today the US vetoed a United Nations Secuity Counsil resolution condemning the targeted assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin . With three abstentions and eleven members voting in favor of the resolution, America once again stood in the way of international accord over Israel's "security" decisions. I just hope that the current administration takes note that we have given the go-ahead for premeditated strikes against foreign leaders. I am sure that terrorists around the world have also taken note.

it hurts my eyes...

i commiserate (2 m 1 s, or 1 m 2s?) with lilho. I have a stupid sinus thing now too. For like a week and half now. It's disgusting. Who knew I could produce a gallon of assorted sputum per day? I think this is the first time for me having one (though my memory is admittedly less than keen in regards to these sorts of details). Empathy abounds. Please take and share.

sidenote: quote from war secretary John Calhoun to president Monroe around 1819, speaking to the Cherokee delegation: "You see the Great Spirit has made our form of society stronger than yours, and you must submit to adopt ours if you wish to be happy by pleasing him." So, haters of GW should realize that he is nothing new, we've been this way all along. Let's all just get with the program, eh?

Once again Israel has used missiles to kill in broad daylight. Yesterday they assassinated Sheik Yassin, leader of the militant Palestinian separatist group Hamas. There are a couple points worth mentioning. Frist off, assassination is a dangerous game to play. It sets a precedent that killing is okay on the battlefield or off, and yes the terrorists make no such discriminations, but is it a good idea for a modern army to sink to these levels? As Robert Fisk points out (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5191), maybe George and Tony have nothing to worry about, but what of all our envoys and ambassadors, has Israel made them potential targets? Second, there is the imagery. A frail old man in a wheelchair is blasted out of existence by Israeli missiles fired from a warplane. To use Steve Weissman's words (http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/032404A.shtml) the David is slain by the massive Goliath. And image matters. Like those against the Iraq war keep saying, the more you kill civilians, the more anger there is, and anger breeds terror. It is also worth noting that Yassin was the spiritual leader of Hamas, he is a Muslim cleric, and his killing will reverberate not just through Hamas members, but through a wide swathe of Muslems in general. Obviously the point is that if you use terrorist methods for your own goals you are only going to escalate the violence, create new terrorist troops, and find no support in the international community (US excluded, of course).