The Tea Drinkers Liberation Front

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 12:52

The Conspiracy against Tea and the Tea Drinkers Liberation Front
In the States not since the Boston Tea Party has there been a decent cup of tea
A tribute to Malachi McCormick’s timeless book A Decent Cup of Tea

Have you ever wondered how it is that at every café with a fast food styled drive through no less which can be found on all those streets that look the same across all the states how difficult it is to find a simple cup of tea? There are endless electronic apparatus and appliances for grinding and brewing all sorts of different coffees but you know as well as I do what is in store for a member of the tea drinking resistance! Within all those places that euro “want to be” types call cafés and no longer coffeehouses, are so many different cups of coffee and coffees of the day to choose from… There in those little shops of coffee horrors are the ranges of coffee beans waiting to be hatched into the perfect cup of coffee from earthy brown roasts to dark oily roasts. There are special foreign made complicated machines and mugs and frilly unnecessities like frothed and steamed milk, or cream, whipped or not, skimmed or not and all with an insiders lingo to order all these like some brazen form or retail pretentious performance art. There are flavored coffees and such sizes and names and prices; from a shot of one or two (does it come with a needle and an elastic strap?) of Italianate espresso to a bowl of French styled café au lait which when an American orders this it sounds like a Spanish Bullfighters call “ole” rather than something to do with milk from the French language!

The best coffee memory from back home for everyone old enough to remember these pieces of vanishing America who can do so without the help of the movies is the old American diner. Those inexpensive coffeehouse cafés of automatic Bunn brand coffee dished out with free refills and a smile has unwillingly gone by the wayside relegated to a certain collective mythology as even the most working class American buys their Cup-O-Joe on board a television sci-fi Battlestar Galactica from a dubious Starbuck of sorts. You remember Bunn coffee diner style now only a David Lynch Twin Peaks memory – the dark brown plastic handle on the plastic pot direct from the burner for regular coffee and the orange handled pot for decaf or so you hoped if your clinically white polyester wrapped beehive-ed hairdo-ed waitress was nice. Remember the heavy white crockery mug with sturdy handle? Who remembers the big usually red metal and chromed coffee grinder with a dial to select the coarseness? A decent albeit American version of a cup of tea could be had, something from a Lipton brand bag and an actual sturdy tea cup and saucer – not great but not bad when on the road. From that last bit of southern diner gentility gone with the 20th century and Route 66 to an American Biggie in a Styrofoam or waxed paper cup and plastic lid as if it were soda pop of about a half liter in size from a gas station with gourmet coffee and a drive through alongside donuts and policemen and all available in decaf alternatives. It isn’t right when that big coffee to go cup then fits appropriately in a big SUV’s built in beverage holder… Dorothy something isn’t right in the Matrix program.

Have you ever wondered why though if you fancy a decent cup of tea that you get a blank looking face from the café counter attendant – a look suggesting “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969” (like the Eagles once lamented about other things and please bring me my wife)… And if after that strange hesitation when you think the waiter is going to break into a song, like in that surreal pause after dialogue before a song is sung in a Hollywood musical… They vanish to re-emerge with their tail between their legs with a coffee mug of brackish warm water and at most a selection of paper bagged teas. If it’s a “want to be” upscale place you might even be lucky enough for a Twinings bag, if not it’s Lipton. If it’s a bag of Tazo or say the Republic of Tea etc. and on and on to disappointing etc. then it’s most likely from the hip left leaning establishments left over from late nineteen nineties. The new retail domestic bag brand called Revolution Tea in a spiffy match box is more about the bag and the packaging but lacking the balls for any real impressive idea of revolt. If its bag tea next to a white porcelain pot of hot water it’s probably in a restaurant with cloth napkins and you’ll be paying with plastic. If you are lucky there is a slice of lemon, honey, sugar and milk or at the least any one but certainly not all of those. By the time the server has brought you your hot water for your tea the water is no longer warm enough to steep (for they couldn’t even bother to put the tea bag in the cup or pot before the hot water was released onto the oldest stale bag of left over lip-torn tea).

Forget it if you go out with coffee drinkers to a café and order bag tea. The server will extract from his coffee machinery first your hot water into a mug for your tea then take fifteen or twenty minutes to make your “friends” coffees. When the tray of hot drinks arrives and you get a chance to hurriedly dunk your bag the hot water is not hot at all! No surprise there – it wasn’t an accident. It was one more tired example of the Conspiracy against tea drinkers by the coffee drinking majority.

How many times have you gone out for a cup of tea and just wanted to run behind the café counter and with a well rehearsed Edward Norton and Brad Pitt styled Fight Club punch knock out your prissy coffee queen server with that fastidiously coiffed so it looks like it hasn’t been washed in a week hairstyle and make your own goddamned cup of tea the way it should be? I literally have to restrain myself from this temptation every time I go out and want a cup of tea. Tea is about the moment and what better way than to celebrate the moment at a coffee conspiring retail establishment than to take back our right to a decent cup of tea with a little blood and loose teeth? Maybe in jail behind bars you can find a tea comrade of a police offer to find sympathy and comfort with if only for a moment. Anything is better than tea at a retail chain establishment or worse one of those mega media stores disguised as a bookstore with art and a café that looks like the set to a morning TV talk show.

Ask yourself how many times have you accepted your fate as an ex-pat foreigner of a tea drinker in your native coffee drinking country and dunked your bag into the cooling water. How many times have you wondered about the coffee stains at the bottom inside of the mug and were content to stir things around with a stainless steel greasy spoon. Meanwhile your companions sit smugly pleased with vertical art sculptures of coffee confections unlike anything you can begin to think of how you would actually get all that mountain of dairy passed your lips with all that foam pomp and circumstance.

That elusive cup of tea that even the British can no longer remember how to make properly is like the Empire of either Anglophone land astride the almighty Atlantic sadly gone. For the water is now tap and thus chlorinated and fluoridated to such a degree that the cup of tea now smells like a baked public swimming pool. You don’t even want to know about the cryptosporidium content from that polluted tap! That coffee mug of hot water sitting before you, waiting for you to dunk your bag into, that looks and smells like it was ladled from some forgotten health spa Jacuzzi. With all the machinations for coffee is there no way in hell to get filtered fresh aerated and de-ionized water disease free for tea, piping hot, laid on to fresh whole tea leaves? Which will God forbid then need strained by a strainer? With all the teas from around the world can we not have a choice in tea leaves without paying a small fortune as coffee lovers get to choose their beans? Is there a conspiracy against those of us who prefer tea leaves to tea dust granules in paper bags or arty coffee by the liter? Of course any coffee preferring individual would say not whilst any tea lover would disagree; there is a conspiracy against the tea drinker and as always it comes down to politics and the relentless soul stealing march of capitalism.

If you ask me the conspiracy against tea drinkers started with the unforgettable Boston Tea Party which is now sadly as a historical tidbit of propaganda (did it actually ever really happen?) relegated to the likes of elementary school education books which don’t ever get much read in this day and age of mis-education. And let’s face it most elementary age kids aren’t imbibing yet in too much tea or coffee when there are Coca-cola profits to be made with hot lunches. Of course any tea drinker would support the idea behind the Boston Tea Party. Some colonialist corporation like Merry Old England taxing everything including the precious tea without any sort of representation is just too typical of even US politics (domestic and foreign policies) today. Tea is supposed to be cheap not taxed to high hell along with everything else. Hmmm sounds just like the Bush administration of today doesn’t it? and again it’s another George! Replace Merry Old England with Globalization and Multi-National Corporations each with more revenue than a good sized European country and its time for another tea party on the scale of an Alaskan Exxon Valdez.

So where does one go with such a big conspiracy against tea in this day an age? Well there is always the Taliban I suppose. They probably make a really good cup of generous and hospitable tea over an open fire served up with sympathy for the traveler over there in the mountains of Afghanistan. Despite the American occupation of Iraq you can probably even as an American get a good cup of tea there in Baghdad city during one of the many post Saddam power outages and water shortages. Certainly tea drinkers are treated like terrorists when it comes to getting serviced in the West. Arabia is the last civilized place where you can get dependable tea: Whether sweet mint Moroccan green tea with a hint of orange blossom aroma or Al Shay spiced with Cardamom in Arabia. To the sweetest most delightful cup of various Pakistani styled chai indeed the last stand of a dependable cup of tea might be from the self sufficient citadel of Islam known as Pakistan. Dependable cups of tea are symptomatic of a strong healthy Nation and undependable cups of tea for the people are signs of the failed states in the nations of the West. Think about that! It is so true! I mean when I ask for tea back home in old Ohio you would think I was seven feet tall with a long ante bellum beard and wearing a long white shirt and a small white hand crocheted skull cap. Maybe I should carry as a fashion accoutrement a Kalashnikov slung over my shoulder to get the cup of tea I so desire.

As any decent cup of tea maker knows that the only good cups of tea in the West come from someone’s humble home from within the lonesome kitchens of tea fanatics: Consigned to solitary cups of tea while cafes are loaded down with overly social Screaming Mimi coffee fiends. In the occasional kitchen of a tea fanatic revolutionary you will find no bags for individual cups of tea. Certainly no deplorable Celestial Seasonings with those arty cardboard boxes! There will be a sturdy well used pot and some proper cups maybe a few cracks or chips to compliment the crackpot character of a today’s last stand of the tea drinkers! All of these unintended effects allow the tea to achieve easily the desired temperature for taking the tea in dignity and camaraderie.

Just to show that we tea drinkers are not unreasonable towards our coffee loving friends despite our being denied tea and not being cranky we observe a lot of what is still good about the art of coffee. It too is a lost art:

Whatever became of New Orleans Café du Monde adjacent to Jackson Square did Katrina wipe this landmark away or had all those fast food coffee cafes replaced her first I wonder? It’s been years since I was lost and in love with that old great dame of New Orleans. Back then in the early nineteen nineties you could still find beignets and café au lait anytime of the day or night and as I was in New Orleans during one of the colder winters in an apartment with no heat, Café du Monde was a reliable place to go get warm with a smile and a friendly chat. There wasn’t going to be a decent cup of tea from their kitchen but as any tea soldier knows sometimes its better to settle for coffee than be disappointed by improperly made tea. From there to the 24 hour bars which were warm and back to avoid the cold. A decent cup of tea was hard to come by but I didn’t complain. Tea drinkers know if you complain about the lack of tea available you will become as bitter in spirit as unsweetened coffee.

If you are bored and want to amuse yourself at a café watch your server make a special cup of deluxe coffee for someone sitting nearby. Watch the retail clerk performance by first grinding the beans and setting up the coffee making apparatus. Watch your servers bar tender like showman ship from the flick of the wrists to the pushing of buttons and even how they use their use their hips in such ways to generate this coffee extravaganza. Watch how intently they steam the milk under all that hot water pressure. The affected pretenses involved in making the cup of coffee a work of art. And how this whole process starts with this incomprehensible language of one up man ship to say I know more about this coffee fashion than you! Compare that to the process involved with ordering tea… You mean you don’t want a bottle or can of “iced” tea…? Then the blank stare: Hot tea? “…We haven’t had that spirit here….” You know the routine (since like 1869). The servers posture deflates, they skulk off to the drudgery of the kitchen dragging their heels – first to go take their much needed cigarette break after such a culture shock confrontation. No game of pretension to play to see who is best – clerk or customer. No question like which kind of leaf would you like even though the list for coffees is long… If only the server would ask what kind of tea you want steeped so they can start the process with the heat… and the right temperature for the proper tea leaf as not all tea leaves were created equal when it comes to steeping temperatures but that is just way to much to ask. Then when your tea is brought to you it is not presented like a frothy coffee creation it is sort of absent mindedly dropped off by the server without eye contact while they are busy pre-occupied with their more important coffee games.

It’s just too much to bear. In fact the best cup of tea that is way beyond decent is when you have turned your back on the strip malls of civilization and have gone camping on a weekend experiment like out to a modern version of Thoreau’s Walden. Then with hot stones around the fire used to warm your cups and tea pot you precariously boil spring water to pour over just the right amount of tea leaves in the pot. Even there on the ground by the fire you can make the best cup of tea no amount of money can buy. It’s a rare sort of American version (albeit diluted somewhat) of a tea drinker’s genuine Japanese tea ceremony. In the solitude of nature with only trees as a quiet companion away from civilization you can find the necessary frame of mind to make a perfect pot of tea. In the city you can only hope at best for a Malachi McCormick styled decent cup of tea from your own or your comrade’s kitchen. But away in a natures retreat with time to think and meditate on every important step in making tea you will yield tea the way it was intended. You will thank your higher power that this process will never be retailed and mass marketed across continents around the world. To find a perfect or at the least a decent cup of tea you must first venture into yourself and find that calm spring of tranquility and start from there. From all this albeit New Agery is where tea making begins which is why it’s a process that can be shared but not purchased – This is what every tea drinker knows is the result of the Conspiracy – and why when we sit with that cup of coffee we don’t want - we understand why the perfect cup of tea has no price – it is forever a gift of nature and a form of charity from civilized souls despite their worldly means – evidence perhaps of some Divine compassion.

 

NO WAY! Barbara Bush did not just say that!

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 12:18

How is it that according to journalist Holly Martins a former first lady can go down on media record as having accussed (while chuckling to herself about) those left behind in the New Orleans Superdome "as being welfare layabouts on the make" as Martins so eleoquently puts it. When the culprit is the Bush spawning Barbara no one is surprised. Why wasn't such a comment kept behind closed doors but brazenly made intentionally for others to hear? Perhaps Barbara Bush can go live in that Houston refugee stadium for awhile in the human squalor there with real Americans to see why her attitude on the less fortunate is nothing but racial and hateful. Barbara Bush like the whole of the Bush Junior Administration should have been living in the New Orleans Superdome those nights that the rest of the nation turned their backs and let a once grand old city get its less fortunate washed out to sea. I wish like Michael Moore said to George Bush Jr awhile back from the Hollywood Oscars "Shame on you" that we could say "shame on you Barbara Bush for saying such things". In reality we have only our selves to blame for allowing 25 years of governmental downsizing of which the failed Katrina aftermath is just the tip of the iceberg. All we can say to the henchmen and their wives like Barbara Bush is "shame on us" for having voted for such selfish idiots.

 

A Long Ode to the New Orleans Mayor Mr. Tell It Like It Is Nagin

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 12:57

I sing a song here of a long Ode if you will to the Mr. Ray naggin’ Nagin the Mayor of Old Orleans the newest Atlantis. However, this story begins in the suburbs of a nation marooned behind TV sets and huge TV meals whose leisure time is spent sitting in expressway traffic babysat by dubious radio voices….

You know as well as anyone the consequences of bad breeding and suburban isolation with too much weird health and wealth and happiness religious influences from the self proclaimed Angels of the right wing as much as I do. Certainly my life as much as anyone else in North America has been victimized by this dark side of the American Dream so I am inclined to write out my frustration with living with that difficult legacy so as not to go completely crazy. I confess, I am jealous of anyone who can write in modern American English scathing words against the insulated politicians of today like Mike Davis and his essay ‘The Sidelining of Blacks” can write. At least I read (red) his old essay which wasn’t exactly the easiest thing for me to do or find online either! Yes I am ashamed to confess that… but I read (reed) and try to read (reed) and even surprise myself by what I have read (red). I wish I were the kind of writer who could make such a difference as this heroic writer Mike Davis but then not so many people read (reed) today anyway. You know everyone is stuck in traffic these days so they have to be read (red) to by the likes of scary conservative agenda for profit talk show personalities – In much the same way that Cuban cigar rollers get read (commie red) great literary works to while they work making the worlds best cigars by hand. Like Americans get read (red) to by populist media personalities so no one gets to read (reed) all that great alternative news information that is actually available around the world via the internet. You can’t exactly read (reed) a great book while driving or riding in a car. Try finding audio books that aren’t hacked up in abridgements – the likes of which you can be certain our boy George junior spent his summer vacation “reading” by being electronically read (red) to by seriously abridged audio books. Do you really think he or his wife at least read (red) every one of those 1,500 pages of summer reading he set out to on his own do you? What with the likes of the ghosts of American soldiers who died in Iraq scratching at the door like the poet Poe’s big black subconscious crow? While Cindy Sheehan camped outside the gates of the vacation ranch with the ghost of Casey and others like him do you think that president read any of those books himself?

After reading online today and hearing the news from the BBC World Service about the new Supreme Court nomination by Bush junior I feel sincerely suicidal. It doesn’t seem enough anymore to just apply for a passport to somewhere else to get away from the states. Personally I am looking into a Belgian, Pakistani or Yemeni passport as a ticket out of the ongoing Bush nightmare. This whole Katrina disaster and the failed government’s contribution to the suffering of good people have left me really down right sick and depressed. There isn’t a news report on the Gulf (the other one in North America not “the Gulf “ over there by Iraq) that doesn’t hurt to see regarding the suffering and humiliation the people in the South are having to pay for the sins of the Bush administration with their lives and homes. Plus that whole added sideline in the news that when someone is looting they are young and black but if they are dying of dehydration and exposure they are old and white. I mean you see there is now not so long a distance anymore from South Africa of the recent past to the USA of today.

I mean I thought I was through with my addiction to Americana but I forgot about the irresistible charm and enchantments of New Orleans. The idea of this grand old Dame of an American city really being gone submerged just under the surface of the water is heartbreaking. Even under water the drowned corpse of an aged urban Ophelia has a haunting beauty and elegance few cities in North America can hope to be as beautiful as while still alive and thriving. New Orleans is past tense as in good Old Orleans as she most certainly is has just had the effect on me as if Bush jr himself (and not Katrina the Hurricane) had somehow reached in and ripped my heart out, squeezed it and then thrown it away. To have to see Clinton standing with the two Bushlings on TV is equally upsetting. I am sorry but I always thought Clinton was really conservative when it came to political ideologies (not that he had a choice) but it was the best we could hope for at the time. I just think there is a divide worth defending in the states and Clinton was wrong to be seen with those two GOP father and son monsters. Better Clinton align himself with the Heroic tell it like it is New Orleans Mayor named Ray Nagin and the good and humble home building Jimmy Carter than the profiteering off global suffering Bushlings – that was wrong and unforgivable of Clinton and cannot be defended as above politics. Nothing is not political when it comes to a Bush, period - end of sentence - as Mother, God rest her soul, would say! Clinton the last heroic American President was clearly wrong in this gesture to be seen with the devils incarnate Bush Jr and Sr. Everything is again wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

And where the fuck is that new Nazi boy Hitler’s Youth Pope? New Orleans is the heart of Catholic American mythology…. Is there not even a statement from the Vatican on behalf of all those New Orleans Catholic parishes under the curse of God for having been meddling in Voodoo? Where is anyone – where is Anne Rice? Her recent New York Times article titled Do You Know What It Means Lose A City Like New Orleans was hardly a fitting obituary to her grand home town but I guess it was all she could get the papers to publish: Better that insufficient New York Times obituary than nothing for which we are all thankful to read. But I doubt her and her son Christopher stayed behind and camped out with provisions in their fab Garden District home – sadly I wish they would have done so because I want someone else to admire as much as I have the heroic New Orleans, “tell it like it is fearlessly to the powers that be”, Mayor! Where are all those white Southern Baptist preachers who would go on secret sin weekends in New Orleans to get barebacked by some rough trade Black Stud fresh out of Lil’ Kim’s toaster? Where are the capacities to start up a new Berlin airlift – it only takes some ploughs brought in by heavy military planes to clear out a make shift runway and set up all that. Why is the pathetic post Katrina rescue operation so bent on busing out blacks to a dubious concentration camp in Texas of all places? Keep in mind Texas is the capital punishment capital of the world so we should all be worrying about what the final solution is for the poor black southern refugee question.

Is the solidity and security of the states that much of an illusory layer that can be blown away by a storm that has been predicted as long as anyone in America can remember? Is the strength of the states that much of an illusion that like the often repeated TV news image of rescuing one family from the roof of their inundated home by helicopter while the old shingles which survived Katrina were blown off the neighbors house by a rescue chopper? Bush ain’t gonna pay for a new roof for that guys chopper de shingled roof that is for sure! Mark my word as those shingles were blown away one by one we will see what we take for granted in America being blown away…. New Orleans was just one shingle, the WTC buildings a few others, what are the next big unimaginable pillars of our country to be swept away as if it were loose paper like roof shingles? Anything now is possible and imaginable when it comes to the destruction of the American dream and illusion of permanence thanks to the Bushlings.

Jesssus, whenever I hear Bush talk, everything and I mean everything, he is scripted to say, an unable to read even after five years of teleprompting, can be seen through – his lying is as obvious as is his personal for Halliburton profit agenda… You can bet he and his henchman and Condi with all her new Imelda Marcos shoes will rebuild the redneck Riviera and the Old Orleans in such a way to fit their financial interest above the needs of we the people. They might as well just call it Las Halliburton and be done with it – that would at least be the first honest thing this son of a Bush bitch administration have done. I want to turn on the radio tomorrow and hear a sobbing Condi begging for forgiveness for her treachery to the poor African Americans now homeless by going back herself to the stores she was shopping at and returning in humiliation all her shoe shopping exploits from the day Katrina paid a visit to the states! We want to see the real Americans caught in New Orleans that day to see Ms Rice returning her shoes as the nation in one collective effort hurls the shame she deserves for this stupid shopping expedition while the nation she is sworn to serve and protect suffered.

It is only all too obvious the Bushlings agenda on the necessary further evacuation of New Orleans… It can then be made to be like Iraq with only embedded “journalists” so that no one can contradict this administrations lies. And they aren’t even good at lying anymore nor are they convincing. My god retail laborers working on this past “labor day” can get fired for any reason in today’s conservative economics but any slacker at FEMA has an unimaginable job security that even the Bush Jr administration would be jealous of. (Yeah, I’m from Ohio we like to end our sentences with a preposition, thank you).

Really this is just heart breaking… New Orleans was the only desirable place in the US because she was the most Un-American place left in the states. Where is God? Why didn’t the storm sweep away this nasty administration and all their judges in the Supreme Court? Let us all pray each in our own way for a catastrophic Act of God to go directly to Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill to usher in instant Karma for this administration’s sins (to name but a few) of lying, greed, and neglect.

I am not good at praying but I ask Allah Almighty God to get a clue and use his power to cut through all the Bushlings insulated layers of wealth and security to first bring shame to these men and women and then hasten their death. This is my prayer at the moment! Why? Why? Why is it always the poor and the black who seem to suffer the most on this planet from a seemingly predetermined divine act when guys like Bush cruelly profit off of their loss? This is why I feel suicidal. It is not hard to fathom why suicide bombers do what they do. Take someone who is so down about “man’s inhumanity to man” and then you can easily seduce them into thinking they can make a difference with a bomb. This is the sad consequence we are making in the world we are at present so blindly determined to shape with our foreign policies. Why is it Nine – Eleven which I still haven’t recovered from didn’t see Capitol Hill taken down? Why haven’t we seen Air Force One and all its decoys taken down? Why is it on that Nine Eleven morning Atlanta’s CNN siren like mouthpiece of propaganda was not taken down….? Why is it when the Pentagon was hit we the people thought like new radicals, well, you get what you give? Why is it always the good if not poor people who are turned into powerless pawns by the world’s cold hearted people – whether Un-Islamic Islamist extremists or Democratists (yeah new word get used to it) like the Bush familia?

Why after all this occupation are we still calling Iraq full of “insurgents”? Is the dictionary definition (as if God almighty wrote the Oxford English Dictionary himself and sent its many volumes down to humanity) of an “insurgent” those who rise up against those in power. But those in power in Iraq are foreign occupiers. People caught in lands with unjust occupiers need a new word coined for those who rise up to liberate themselves from foreign tyranny. Just like the US is occupied at present by the Bush dynasty, their henchmen and accomplices in the administration and around the nation and world: We the people of the United States must rise up like Iraqi insurgents and take back our country from the humiliation of the failed Bush jr administration. If we the people of the United States don’t get rid of these Bushlings then Bin Laden and co might go down in history as decent Arabian men who tried to liberate the good American underdogs from a 21st century styled King Leopold the Second over lording his private colony the massive Congo of a previous long forgotten age.

I don’t understand it I’m raking my brain to understand and I just don’t. As much as I hope for a new country to emerge out of all of this right winged crap I know it won’t happen but what I do think can happen and fear happening is, that the strength and the security of the states is an illusion and it’s the likes of the Bushlings who will more than any other threat on the planet wipe away the country we have known to be home. And if it does get wiped away you know all those Bushlings will run off to some historical safe haven in Argentina to go live with Eva and Adolph and their descendents in the don’t cry for me Madonna’s Argentina of a South American high security Israeli settlement compound commune.

Well the one optimistic side to all this craziness is that I end up looking a helluva lot less crazy headed than I used to in these crazy days in the West! I force feed myself anything to make me laugh – graphic novels, cartoons, on-line jokes, anything, talking back to the TV and radio has helped considerably. More and more whenever I see and hear Bush jr I laugh and point the finger. He might do everything like a cheap modern version on an Edna Ferber character from the book GIANT big but he fucks up even bigger. Ho, Ho, Ho, Merry Christmas! If his fuck ups weren’t spelling Anarchy for his own nation – causing death and suffering for real human citizens – it would be a funny sort of history. I mean the President cannot get his face and what he says at any time in public to co-ordinate. He cannot read a teleprompter worth shit. God it’s time like these that as much as I might have disagreed with Clinton who is still a Hero in my mind that I miss Clinton doing what a leader should do: No matter what the crisis of the nation or his personal life scandal, Clinton could stand before his people and assert his calming presence even over the electronic services to help the people he served. This Clinton caliber character is the president we need now to clean up Katrina and clean up the selfishness of the American Military ego in Iraq. We need a new President now (I hereby nominate the heroic Ray Nagin!) and we need a new Foreign Policy even more as we need someone better suited to the job than an Imelda Marcos shoe collecting type. Get a new hair style Condi after you return your bloody Dorothy slippers! And we don’t need a new cross eyed conservative judge on the Supreme Court to infiltrate our bedrooms at this point in the Apocalypse of the Empire. If you are going to dismantle our nation then at least let us fuck legally in the peace and privacy of own home behind closed doors!

What we always thought could not happen to the states is happening but the states is now shockingly doing it to itself for no one else is! We elected the cause of our own problems not once but twice (thanks and fuck you too Ohio!) and now that we know it we can’t terminate his lease on that infamous residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue anymore than we can end the carnage of present day Iraq. Sad but true we the people of all colors can’t bear to be the nickled and dimed Americans to bale out the Bushes stupid lily white asses any more. Nor as Gore and Kerry or Clinton for that matter have proved can the Democrats – when no one in the unforgivable and unforgettable 2000 elections - stood up for the “we the little colored folks” of the nation. It was always “their” nation anyway, we knew this through and through and in our bones – this is not our Nation, not our president, not our governors, not our banking scandal, not our Enron scandal, not our war, not our oil, definitely not our foreign policy. We will not bale out the Bush’s at our minimum wage tax payer expense for Katrina. We will not provide corporate welfare for the energy giants when we have no welfare for ourselves. Bush owes the nation and payday for we the people has finally arrived after too many decades. We can send the space shuttle up toward the moon and aim for Mars but we can’t get off our addiction to fossil fuels. Neither can we end under employment! Priorities, sister America, priorities – priorities, brother America, priorities – your actions speak louder than your blank eyed president. The blank eyes, the blank face, the smug, smirking, sneering lipless lips, and what his voice says are unrelated and unconnected to his face and it’s all a dead give away of a liar who does not even understand why he is lying let alone what he is suppose to be saying and how!

The Nation that we always knew was not an illusion of our making anyway - it was a white dream for a white people and what was left over was for the white mans guilty conscience to give to the poor white persons and then what little was left over from that was for the blacks and all the other colors of the rainbow. (This is the “trickle down theory” of Bush senior). This new awareness is the psychic tidal wave of an aftershock that Katrina laid bare across the land from sea to oil slicked shining sea – a flood of destruction that didn’t have to take make New Orleans an idea in the past tense now regrettably lost as Old Orleans. If there is a god this path of destruction that will be called an act of God will hopefully wash away the “White” House (an appalling name in this day an age of racial multi-culturalism) while taking Capitol Hill down with it and all the corporations and banks that keep the Beast alive so that the nation can be handed back to all the Americans equally for once.

If we can learn this from Biloxi and New Orleans and that whole other Gulf region the size of half of France under water and all those people who didn’t have to die because of 25 years of Governmental negligence and downsizing – if we can get our country back from this then perhaps we can say farewell to all the dead good people and a grand old city with dignity and hold our heads up high even though we are mourning our losses for the rest of the world to see. The rest of the world still wants to see a proud Lady Liberty as a beacon of true and not corporate liberty and not a beacon of Bush like economic Imperialism. Let’s face it until the Bush administration packs their bags and is forced to leave the United States if not the planet then we might as well dismantle Lady Liberty and put her pieces in storage so we can stop lying to the rest of the world and ourselves.

The collective psychic black crow of Poe of our once great nation is sighing in unison gasps nevermore, nevermore.

 

Humpty Dumpty the President had a Great Fall

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 11:11

Humpty Dumpty the president had a great fall and all of his daddy's horses and all of his daddy's men couldn't put the nation back together again

While less fortunate brothers and sisters were struggling to hang on

If only for another day holding on to babies and grandparents

Holding on for dear life to their beloveds

Unable to bury their dead

Meanwhile the smartest woman from this nation’s administration was out buying shoes with the likes of Imelda Marcos.

Those people of the great old South smuggling food so their families can survive and getting shot by their “government” for looting

In a great old dame of a now submerged city

Reduced to Anarchy by what the insurance corporations will call an act of God

Even though it was years of political downsizing more than a hurricane named Katrina

This latest lost Atlantis (because all the while)

The military's industrial corporate death machines scour the great land of Iraq

Justifying their wrongdoing in the name of Freedom and Democracy and because of something called Terror

While good mothers want to know why their children are dead

Up and down the rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates the Americans go in search of the last drops of oil which only blood can buy

And like Nine-Eleven this administration says they never saw this coming

Never saw Katrina march towards land

Like they never saw the planes fly off course

As if they never saw the inevitable bankruptcy of an unnecessary war

Because the poor are expendable while the rich are not

And why are their no modern day Biloxi and New Orleans styled Berlin Air Lifts to help the poor trapped in a nations sinking Atlantis

Why only cheap buses for the poor when there more than enough planes for the rich?

Planes that could bring in provisions and take out those who didn’t have cars

Cars that would cost less than Condi’s new shoes

How many new big SUV’s left New Orleans with enough unused seats and space in the back?

That a whole black family could have been fit albeit uncomfortably into safety

While citizens wait in the water for their vacationing leaders to come back to work

And yet the Mayor of New Orleans was the only leader in America telling it like it is

It is always the poor and the oppressed who suffer the consequences for the morals of the privileged

To see this we have only to look into the TV faces of men and women and children

Faces from Biloxi and New Orleans and elsewhere caught in the distresses of the greed of the rich

Humpty Dumpty the president had a great fall

And all of his daddy's horses and all of his daddy's men

Couldn’t put the nation back together again

Humpty Dumpty the president had a great fall

Not that Humpty Dumpty the president cared

For he lives beneath a world insulated with layers of security and entitlement blankets

Humpty Dumpty the president had a great fall

And all of his daddy’s horses and all of his daddy’s men

Wouldn’t put the nation back together again…

Humpty Dumpty the president had a great fall in the autumn early autumn of ’05