<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />planet asylum
hissing disbelief .. rabbit:blackhole help!
I’ve been toying with the notion that Ï might be going a tad mad? Staring at Goats? Overwork? Not enough oxygen down the rabbit:blackhole? Too much heat on my melon? Forget that noise. I am as sane as a water jug. I am as sane and placid and sturdy as a plain apple-green water jug. I am very sane — and ëxtrëmëly naïve.
What I’m trying to say if I could figure out a way to say it is that you & me are boringly normal, reassuringly ordinary and familiar rather like a pair of comfy old slippers. Thêse Lîzard people, on the other hand, are hurricane insane, teeth-chatteringly, eyes-bulgingly, skin-crawlingly insane, Category 5 when all the roofs blow off. They are disguised as human beings. They are not. This is what trips you up, takes you in.
Where to start on today’s Lîzard Exposé? Steinbeck, I suppose. I had this starry-eyed notion that art is cathartic, that artists might be brutish, nasty of word and of plot to make an icepick point or two, but that in actual life, they are at least bittersweet and rather roly-poly of soul, like me.When I found that Steinbeck had been writing LBJ to suggest even more excellent ways of maiming the enemy, I quailed. It’s 1984-&-½ — the rats are chewing off your face.
These particular fricots are from the July 2005 Harper’s Readings, passim pp.13-28. (Do subscribe to Harper’s – it’s not a Rock of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Gibraltar, there’s no ground left; but it is a raft in the seething Sea of Crazy.)
In the Galactic Councils when they consider lifting the Cosmic Quarantine of the Planet Asylum(as we are known), the Wise Old Turtle from Antares always — rather wistfully actually, he always longs for redemption – says one word, “napalm,” and they pass onto the next agenda item. Mr. Steinbeck, says LBJ to McNamara, writes him “from time to time . . . with an imaginative flair for war and its weaponry.” Oh good, that’s what that lambent gift, the imagination has been given us for: “What I suggest is a napalm grenade packed in a heavy plastic sphere the exact size and weight of a baseball.” A napalm grenade. “There isn’t an American boy over thirteen who can’t peg a baseball from infield to homeplate with accuracy. And a grown man with sandlot experience can do much better. It is the natural weapon for Americans.” He proprietarily and proudly dubs the napalm grenade, “the Steinbeck super ball.” Let’s ‘peg’ some napalm. I swear to gods, my synapses can’t take this boschian¹ stuff.
I’m not telling you this to torment your reeling mind so much as to remind you to rejoice in your relative normality. I may be eccentricky, but I don’t even think about pegging napalm grenades, so in this equation I can be considered wise enough to say a thing or two.
Ǿ So let’s proceed down the rabbit:blackhole of Malice in Wonderland. Paraphrasedly, some European military intelligence reports say that some American physicians in Iraq are “extracting human organs from the dead and wounded. … The Europeans have noticed the absence of organs from the cadavers dealt with by Americans and have reported to their commanders, who instructed them to maintain silence and to avoid discussion of the subject due to its gravity.” The absence of organs from the cadavers. “Iraqi guides to dead and critically injured individuals are paid $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye.” As a commentator remarked, “Y’might as well save them American rich people. A life is a life.”
Ǿ From Kuttab al-Battar, a jihadist online manual, Exercise 3. “Suppose you are with the mujahedeen in the Philippines, and you are in the jungle, starving, with nothing to eat. You see a bright, colorful frog. Will you feel forced to eat this frog? Or will you waive this appetizing meal:)? Mention why it is possible – or impossible—to eat this frog. Answer: This frog cannot be eaten. Colorful frogs and very big frogs hiding on dry land are poisonous and must not be eaten. If you eat it, you will go to hell:). Better to stay thirsty than to drink poison only to wish your thirst and yourself farewell:).” These are the first smiley faces I have ever allowed out of my typewriter – have the courage of your convictions I say, don’t try to soften the blow – but the quirk of their being used here is so sublime that I couldn’t edit them out.
Ǿ From Kathmandu, Nepal where unrest is ratcheting up, “Clean socks command respect in our society, for there are very few indices by which we can measure prestige. The people living in impoverished districts cannot afford socks. They are a heavenly luxury.” Socks are a heavenly luxury and us oft-spoiled Amuricans ought remember that.
Ǿ Another tidbit mentions Wagner saying in essence that “the pursuit of power destroys love and leads to degradation and downfall.” This relates to Mr. Griffin who exposes 9/11 complicities saying that we usually misquote the “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The ‘tends to’ is deliberately missing from the second clause.
Ǿ Now, my favorite soupcon from this Readings Section of Harpers July 2005. 68 million Chinese people who belong to the Communist party were asked to reflect on their short and strong comings online. (Hmmm, an interesting idea in a, er ah, democracy, no whoops I mean a communist country.) There are two I want to tell you, the second of which I’ll do a whole article on soon.
§ “I don’t take the pain of the people to heart. I don’t try to feel the will of the people. In March a migrant from the Three Gorges area asked me to give him a special permit to recycle scrap metal. Even though he had already come to see me four times, I still used all sorts of excuses to get rid of him. My determination to serve the people wholeheartedly was not strong enough.”
§ “I found it more practical to be humane, to give my staff higher income and benefits, and to solve their problems with housing, employment, schooling, and health care, than to talk about the usefulness of Communism.”
I would only change a single word: “I found it more practical to be humane, to give my staff higher income and benefits, and to solve their problems with housing, employment, schooling, and health care, than to talk about the usefulness of Democracy.”
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¹ Hieronymous Bosch .. see pogblog's Glossary (left sidebar) and clik for illustrative pict.
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Dear Mr Pogblog–
Terrific stuff (as usual) re Karlsputin, his insane agenda and motivation–also shocking to hear of Steinbeck (I thought of him as a voice of sanity and advocate for the underclass of his day).
I never miss reading Pogblog–it's part of my A.M. routine along with my java. Yes, I'm a Java Man, but still human nonetheless.
Would love to hear from some other visitors to your site–it's such delicious fun, and energizes my day.
The organ-stealing rumour is particularly nasty. I thought you'd have more sense than that, pog. For starters, organs are only viable for 24 hours under ideal conditions. Tough to get organs to America from an Iraqi battlefield in that kind of time, which is far from an ideal scenario to begin with.
The original story appeared in the publication Al-Watan, as translated by MEMRI
Among other items published by al-Watan:
The US military engineered the 9/11 attacks, with the help of the Jews.
Women are asking to be harassed when they don't cover their hands.
The nastiest non-rumor in the Middle East is the wide-spread death our money and weapons have caused. I would actually not be against cadaver-robbing if we hadn't snuffed them in the first place. I'm very practical and have the red dot on my license, hoping to be of any use to some still cavorting person when I slough off my space suit perfectly adapted to Earth 15lbs psi.
Frankly, the obsidian joke is that our contract forces mutilated them in the first place, not any handwringing about some second mutilation.
If we were to place 30 World Trade Centers on the horizon so we could see them clearly, that's about how many Iraqi civilians we have nobly snuffed. We are noble; the insurgents are scum of the earth. The whole thing sucks in fact. I loathe them equally. (Tho I suppose I should loathe those more efficient at devastation even more? I'll have to cogitate on that.)
I do agree that I should have made my ironies about the cadaver caper a tad more transparent perhaps. There is plenty of undeniable stuff to point one's finger screaming at — if it weren't cloaked from our emotions by the remarkably effective masks of patriotism and other idiot abstractions. I thought the degrees of handwringing re mutilation ironies would be fairly evident, but I do have a really rotten & loathsome sense of humor and should not assume it in nicer people. But at least I don't twist logics to justify doing the first mutilation — which a lot of nice people are doing these days.
pog