Check the World Book. Not in there? Okay. Now check Britannica. No reference? Right, right. I guess we’ll have to resort to Compton’s. Pull out the 1963 edition, that ought to do it.

Oh, hi. Good god, y’all…. this is a grueling task. To what do I refer, you may ask? No, I’m not making gruel, at least not this evening. (Tomorrow’s menu, however, may include that dubious delicacy… who knows?) Lord, no… many of us here are engaged in finding evidence of the man-sized tuber in various historical accounts, including encyclopedias, history textbooks, comics, etc. After all, it is HE who saved the Republic from a fate worse than death. It is HE who rescued the honor of our most revered president and restored him to the exalted position he once held in the pantheon of the American story. And it is HE who introduced the chocolate cream pie to the post-civil war dinner table… and this BEFORE the invention of the refrigerator. Yes, this is one man-sized tuber that’s larger than life. 

And yet, does his name appear anywhere in the annals of U.S. history? I have yet to see a single jot about him, damn it. That’s gratitude for you.  Here this root vegetable, desicated within an inch of his life, erroneously teleported more than a continent away from his destination then zapped back to Washington, loaded for bear, laboriously wheeled his way up Capitol Hill with what would seem an impossible objective: wrest control of the nation away from that nefarious usurper, anti-matter Lincoln, who had inserted himself into the machinery of state like a log in the works. Some kind of conspiracy, you say? An evil effort to subvert the judgment of history and render meaningless the near-incalculable contribution of one man-sized tuber?

Well, neither. I just made it up, friends. Not a bit of it is true. Tubey never stopped nothin’ from happening. Fact is, even when we got him back to Washington, he couldn’t find his way to the White House or the Capitol. No, he spent most of his time looking for the Lincoln memorial which, of course, WAS NOT BUILT YET IN 1864! For chrissake, tubey! Anyway, the real story is that we got Mitch Macaphee to apply his massive brain to the problem. He actually very cleverly reached back in time to the instant anti-Lincoln arrived in the past and snatched him back to futureland before he could do all that damage. Near as we can tell, all is back as it was before. Except for one small detail. This will make you laugh. Remember president George H. W. Bush? Well, because of some insignificant act on the part of anti-Lincoln back in 1864, Bush’s son George W. became the 43rd president. Weirdest thing.

Sorry about that, man. Blame anti-Lincoln – it’s his bad.

Mill boy to tuber, mill boy to tuber! Do you read, tuber? What’s your position? Can’t read. Can you turn up your gain? Roger. How ’bout this…. try turning down your lose. Ah… much better.

Ah, you have returned. Good on you. Yes, as you may have surmised, the man-sized tuber… ahem, I mean the intrepid man-sized tuber has made his way into the remote past, fully 145 years ago or more, back to the time of Lincoln. His mission? Very simple… to apprehend the nefarious anti-matter Lincoln (one of our various hangers-on) who has somehow supplanted the actual president and begun to drive what’s left of a Civil War-plagued nation into the sewer. Shouldn’t be too difficult a task for a non-verbal overgrown root vegetable on a cart. At least, that’s what our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee had assured me. He said that security was not as tight in those days as it is now, so it shouldn’t be hard for the tuber to catch up with anti-Lincoln to deliver his ultimatum. Piece of cake, right?

Well, not so right. Believe it or not, the tuber has run into some difficulties. For one thing, even though he jumped through the same wormhole as anti-Lincoln, he somehow didn’t land in the same geographical area as anti-Lincoln. Hell, he wasn’t even on the same continent. Tubey and his little cart rolled out of the time warp in Santiago, Chile. Now I know what you’re going to say. Yes, it is a capital. And yes, it is an American capital. But that’s where the similarity ends, my friends. And in any case, similar isn’t enough. We’re talking about the man-sized tuber on a cart a continent away from where he needed to be, in a century when the fastest mode of travel was probably a not-so-fast train. This was not a good beginning. And while tubey bumped around from one end of the Avenue Francisco Bilbao to the other, we set ourselves to the task of working out what to do. (Which involved scratching our heads for a few minutes, then running off to get Mitch Macaphee, who has some semblance of a functional brain.)

Mitch’s suggestion came quickly. Commandeer Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating device and fire it directly at the image of tubey, who was just visible as a cloudy outline in the center of the spiraling shape within the time warp. (Whoa, that was a mouthful.) Mitch would then manipulate the controls in such a way as to transport the man-sized tuber thousands of miles across the 19th Century landscape to where he needed to be. Well, we tried it…. and when we next received word of the tuber (when I say “word”, I actually mean Morse code – we tied a clicker to one of tubey’s more dexterous roots) he did seem to be in a more congenial place vis-a-vis his mission. Which was a good thing… for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), because he has been sitting in the ready room for the last five hours anticipating some kind of back-up rescue mission… a prospect he has not been savoring, I can tell you. Hang in there, Marvin!

So, what the fuck. One thing leads to another, right? My guess is that by the time you check in on this ridiculous account again, something will have happened… somewhere….

Another week, another war… or at least the threat of same. Any week that starts with a nuclear explosion tends to focus the mind a bit, even if it isn’t a very sharp focus in the case of many of those reacting to the recent actions of North Korea. It’s as though we are born anew every six months or so, our past wiped clean, our journey set to begin again. Here we have the grim dividends of a craven policy towards northeast Asia that has become particularly nasty over the past 10 to 15 years (and especially so in the last eight). As it happens, we inched very close to a disastrous war back in 1994, then concluded a framework agreement with Pyongyang that would have provided them with a uranium reactor and ended their international isolation. Due to the vagaries of the Clinton administration and the maniac Gingrich Congress, neither of those provisions was honored. It was then left to the Bush II administration to do its usual job of pouring gasoline on a smoldering problem, placing North Korea squarely within the “Axis of Evil” and setting UN Ambassador John Bolton and others to further antagonize them.

The result is quite apparent. The North Koreans did what numerous other nations have done through the decades when faced with what might reasonably be considered an existential threat: they built a deterrent. Having witnessed Washington’s willingness to invade and destroy nations that clearly do not possess nuclear weapons, Pyongyang apparently opted for what seemed the less risky course. (One can imagine the same kind of thinking taking place in Iran.) It bears remembering, also, that North Korea knows something about the horrors of war. We bombed the place to smithereens during the Korean War, destroying virtually every standing structure in the North – campaigns that resulted in the death of perhaps 2.5 to 3 million people north of the 38th parallel. Regardless of who is to blame for igniting that conflict, it was certainly they who bore the brunt of the destruction. Their culture is largely built around that experience, and it is not surprising that they should engage in what appears to be some defensive saber-rattling.

Sure… that was then and this is now, right? Well, not everyone forgets the past as quickly and efficiently as we do. North Korea is a repressive place run very much like a prison, but its central obsession is national survival. With the change of leadership in the United States, I’m sure Pyongyang is testing Obama’s rhetoric of reconciliation. Seems to me like they’re skeptical that anything fundamental has changed, and frankly, so am I. Consider for a moment the world order we’re living under. Washington and the great powers live under one set of rules with respect to weapons of mass destruction, while developing nations must abide by another. The fact is, the non-proliferation regime requires the U.S., Russia, and other nuclear powers to move decisively towards disarmament, just as it seeks to prevent smaller players from joining the nuclear club. We conveniently ignore the former while waxing righteous about the latter, and while our hypocrisy may not be featured on the Nightly News, it is pretty obvious to the relatively powerless nations of the world.

So, as you hear many voices – the execrable Newt Gingrich among them – calling for military action against North Korea, just remember: a massive war on the Korean peninsula causing hundreds of thousands of deaths is precisely what we want to avoid. So… starting one is hardly a solution.

luv u,

jp