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Twelve days of it.

2000 Years to Christmas

On the first day of something my something gave to me … something, something, something, blah, blah blah blah blah, five golden … things!

Arrgh. Leave us face it. For a band that began its recording career with what was ostensibly a Christmas album, we are terrible at remembering even the most oft-repeated holiday songs. Someone – I think it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – once suggested caroling around the neighborhood on Christmas eve, hoping for some charitable cast-offs and crusts of festive breads, but when you glom over too many lyrics, you lose credibility as a caroler and instead of handing foodstuffs to you, your audiences tend to throw them at you with some force. Personally, when it comes to seasonal pastimes, I prefer the ones that don’t involve serious festive injuries and having steaming vats of hot holiday cheer poured on us from second-story windows. Call me Scrooge.

We don’t have any really strong holiday traditions. Probably the most enduring one is our annual Christmas week sequestration, imposed on us by the local DPW, which views the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill as a handy place to dump tons of snow they’ve removed from more affluent and generously populated quarters. Sure, we can’t emerge from the mill for a stretch of days, but that gives us a reason to be innovative in our festive celebrations. It’s not about how many gifts you buy, or how much food you throw in the garbage disposal …. no no, Christmas is about the little things. Really little things, like nano particles. You see, when we’re snowed in over the holidays, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee takes it upon himself to show us slide presentations of particles he has utilized in his more depraved experiments. A four-hour powerpoint on sub atomic particles – now that’s the kind of Christmas I’m talking about.

Dull.

Speaking of Christmas, as I mentioned before, we are marking the 20th anniversary of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, this season. And when I say we’re “marking” it, I don’t mean urinating on it …. far from it! While 2000 Years To Christmas is not generally available in stores, there are umpteen different ways to hear it, download it, and even get your hands on the disc. If you want to know more, just visit our special Anniversary Page for details.

Otherwise, we’ll be posting a few things over the holidays, as always. Maybe not all twelve days … just the ones we know the lyrics to.

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Descent of man.

When I was about 14, I got obsessed with books of various descriptions and started ordering volumes practically at random from overstock houses like Publisher’s Central Bureau and others. One of the mail-order books I pored over was an oversized tome titled Prop Art, which I still have in the bookcase in my office. It’s an illustrated history of propaganda posters from the late nineteenth Century up until the 1970s, and some of the most memorable illustrations were those of pseudo-scientific racist posters and handbills from one of the neo-NAZI stormtrooper organizations in the 1960s. One sickening example presented a comparison between a black person and a gorilla, arguing feature-by-caricatured-feature that the two were very similar and that the “Races are definitely NOT equal”.

Could've seen THAT coming.I thought of that poster this week when the Rosanne Barr story broke. I will admit that I was never among her fans, but I like to think that fandom would not have kept me from despising her when she started hurling racist epithets. The fact is, that did not start this past week. Since her hey-day in the 1980s-90s, apparently Barr has been careening to the right, adopting and promoting bizarre-ass conspiracy theories, endorsing an increasingly more militarist and oppressive Israeli government, race baiting black women and Muslims, and so on. Clearly, ABC – which has garnered a lot of pundit credit for having fired Barr so quickly – never should have hired her in the first place. But then again, they are in business to make money, right?

We may as well face it – when it comes to the major media content corporations, the bottom line is the bottom line. ABC had a big hit on their hands with Barr, until she, quite predictably, shit all over it by letting her bigoted freak flag fly. They probably made some of the money they were planning on making. NBC did the same thing with Donald Trump. As Lawrence O’Donnell has pointed out, NBC made Trump’s bones as a reality television star, kept him on the air through his racist “birther” campaign against Obama, and ran his election rallies from end-to-end during the campaign. That, more than anything, made that bigot president. But it also made NBC money. And as that CBS chief executive said after the election, it may be bad for the country but it’s good for the corporation.

So I guess some congratulations should go to our corporate media for propelling the descent of man that is the Trump era. Nice work, folks.

luv u,

jp

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Waiting to happen.

There’s a lot of Trump news this week, but I wanted to return to the subject of Korea since that has such enormous potential for disastrous loss of life. The North test launched four ballistic missiles, setting off a firestorm of media coverage and a torrent of speculation from military and diplomatic spokespeople. As usual, most of it misses the mark by a mile. The New York Times articles on the developing crisis mention only in passing the massive join military exercises currently underway by the U.S. and South Korea. One wonders how many rounds, missiles, etc., are typically expended in such exercises.

North Korea's war memoriesUPI reports that there will actually be two joint exercises underway over the coming weeks; one a ground, air, and naval exercise that will include landings (i.e. mock invasions of the north). The other is more a command exercise involving the new THAAD anti-missile system the U.S. is installing in South Korea. So think about this – a practically constant stream of large scale drills, and now a missile battery that threatens to negate what Pyongyang likely thinks of as its nuclear deterrent. Got that? Now combine that with something utterly unknown to Americans – the kind of paranoia that stems from having been invaded and bombed out of existence six decades ago. That may have something to do with these missile launches.

How will the Trump administration react to these tests? It’s hard to say, but if I were to guess I would suggest that their reaction might be similar to the tack taken by the last GOP administration. Dubya (Bush 43) put North Korea on the “Axis of Evil” short list for invasion, perhaps just to make Reverend Moon happy, but I’m not certain of that. That in and of itself might have been the best argument for developing a deterrent. Combined with other factors relating to our long history with Pyongyang, it’s a compelling case. I don’t condone their nuclear weapon design and production programs, but it’s not hard to work out why they might want such weapons. Deterrence, and a prompt to get the United States to a negotiating table. They don’t want six party talks, or three party talks … they want one on one with America, because we are their principal adversary.

This standoff should have ended decades ago. The fact that it’s happening while Trump is president is testament to that very painful truth.

luv u,

jp