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Tribute to New York City 9/11/02

September 11, 2002 by James Campion in Politics | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 9/11/02 REALITY CHECK

NYC – ONE YEAR LATER

These words will hit the stands on 9/11, the one-year anniversary of…all right! Enough! We know, already. How did it happen? How are we different as a nation? Reflections. Tributes. Commentary. Anger. Grief. Patriotism. All over again, and again, and…you guessed it…again.

The United States of American absolutely took an unprecedented hit on the eleventh day of the ninth month of the first year of a new millennium. The United States of America had to rebound, respond and rebuild. Yeah, those people in Hibbing, Minnesota and Flagstaff, Arizona or all points south, west and north had a hell of a time trudging through the shock and devastation.

But what about New York City? What about my town? The island of my birth. The place in my heart. And what about those poor souls who went to work as they did every morning, from every walk of life, and every nationality, never to return.

Nothing against the national psyche or the overall mood of the nation following the terrible events of 9/11/01, but 12 months ago the lower half of Manhattan became a war zone. The tallest buildings on this continent’s eastern seaboard hit the deck in a fiery hail of brick and mortar and steaming led. And hundreds upon thousands of its citizens went down with them.

NYC is the greatest city in the world. It is the greatest city in the history of civilization. Not because it’s big and loud and rich and broke and mean and lovable and dirty and magnificent and peaceful and teetering on the edge of sanity all at the same time, but because its streets are filled with survivors.

NYC was wounded before the first of those Twin Towers hit the pavement. Before a single life was taken. Before a single scream, gasp or rushing civil servant came on the scene. Fear is a tough emotion to hide in a fishbowl.

We all know why the enemies of this nation chose NYC, chose the towering symbol of capitalism run amok, chose to put a gaping fissure into its gloriously fashioned landscape.

Most New Yorkers, or Jerseyites or tri-state “bridge and tunnel” types choose to ignore what the rest of the country or the world thinks about NYC, and everything it stands for. The volume and energy, the brash, dig-deep and call the big dogs out we’re taking this sucker by the jugular and riding it out to God’s horizon kind of gruesome beauty.

And that goes for all the viewpoints of those who see NYC as some kind of moral cesspool of violence and corruption, fast talking power mongers feeding off the young and innocent while the women take the survivors and chew on their intestines for a nicotine substitute. A knockdown, drag-out ugliness fit for the final days of Nero on the precipice of human gluttony hardly imagined by the middle-class backbone of salted American earth.

Yeah, we pretty much ignore that kind of shit around here. Those who have spent fifteen minutes in NYC know how much passes for truth and whatever’s left is everything we want everyone else to think about it.

When I was in Israel some six years ago now, I can recall the utter mask of horror that would engulf the faces of the locals when I informed them of the place from which I hail. At the time I was living about 30 miles northwest of the big town and the poor bastards wondered what had kept me alive so long. These are people who live in the REAL Ground Zero, and not just for the past few months, but the past four decades. These were the souls who had heard all they wanted to hear about NYC.

Israelis concerned for New Yorkers.

And maybe, well…as it turns out, they were correct.

Be that as it may, the rest of this nation, and the globe for that matter, watched NYC take the monumental hit 12 months ago, and although there has been much song and story attached to it, NYC took it like the proverbial champ.

The mayor was a tireless lunatic, the police a swarming cadre of manic fusion and the fire department, a 360, crease-streak, four-on-the-floor, top-gun slam dunk. And the people, NYC’s people, came with the good stuff. No, the great stuff. A hymn for humanity. It was a thing to behold.

It was an historical thing to behold and then some. That day, and every day after. It was, it is, NYC, with all its warts and scars and bad stories from bad neighborhoods and bad asses, cranking it up night after night after night. Putting it back together. Smoothing the edges. Filling the holes, especially the ones in the chests of its grieving.

NYC had to show the rest of this spinning sphere how to get up, and clean up, and cauterize the wound. To stabilize, like a body invaded by a virus must. Go on, or die trying. Fighting. Fighting for survival, the kind of survival no American metropolis has had to struggle for since the Civil War.

Economic downturn, disasters on Wall Street and the fear of the wandering tourist aside, NYC had a hell of a winter and spring and summer. I was there for a chunk of it. Collecting traffic tickets, getting into fierce debates, closing bars and experiencing friends and colleagues as they created great theater and music and sports, and getting infused like before.

Only for many of us who can’t remember a deviation from the skyline, it is different now. Not because we choose to ignore it or gloss it over with a New Year’s sheen or some summer festival charm, but because part of survival is merely living. Part of the victory of death is a new life, a resurrection, because in a world where safety is a luxury beyond all of our pocket books, drowning out the sorrow by facing the dawn is its cure.

NYC is the greatest city in the world. It is the greatest city in the history of civilization. Not because it’s big and loud and rich and broke and mean and lovable and dirty and magnificent and peaceful and teetering on the edge of sanity all at the same time, but because its streets are filled with survivors.

Fighting. Fighting.

Living.

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james campion.com

September 4, 2002 by James Campion in Pop Culture | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 9/4/02 REALITY CHECK

FOUR DECADES – ONE HUNDRED LIVES

“It’s just another night on the other side of life.” – Ian Hunter

Here’s the problem with turning 40, which I do on the ninth day of September, 2002, or a few days from the time this hits the streets. You see, it actually seems like I’m technically 110, or somewhere in my mid-hundreds. Not unlike say, Moses or Noah, or any of those Biblical types that lived well into their second or third centuries.

Aging, or should I say, experiencing life, is an odd process, seeing how most of what you really know is what is right in front of you and most of what you’ve already accumulated in the way of knowledge is ghostly, like a dream of some kind. And by the time you reference this crap its so completely meaningless in the realm of your current reality, you seem like a doddering fact-finder trying to impress the congregation.

Let me explain this as best I can within the structure of this column and the space limits in which it imposes.

My childhood used to matter to me. The events of days around pre-school or somewhere thereafter held an almost monumental theme to my teens and my early-to-mid-twenties. And since I’ve never been in therapy and barely attended the few psychology classes of my youth, these events have seemed to fade into a kind of peaceful oblivion. Not to mention drowned out by my over-use of testosterone-addled rage and teen angst transformed neatly into random poetry, wild prose and silly rock songs.

I guess if I’m lucky, I’ll have a few hundred more lives. Some of my fellow compatriots weren’t so fortunate. After all, hiding has its casualties.

So by my early twenties, I’d developed this character in my head that resembled my childhood persona in no possible way. The shy, blonde and blue-eyed runt whose mother dressed like a porcelain doll every day before attending the rigors of Catholic school was replaced by some kind of mutant. I grew up in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in the Bronx with everyone around me looking like something between John Travolta and some key cast member of The Godfather. So the quiet, outcast thing was predisposed, but not manipulated until the teenage years when I quickly became a foul-mouthed slop-head with a penchant for hating everything known to modern civilization and then some.

Although, if I can break for a moment, I must say, my parents recently visited Fort Vernon and brought clippings from my high school and college newspaper days, as well as the odd published mess from whatever bones the education system throws young loons like myself who fancies himself a scribe. And I must say, not too much of what comes spewing forth in this space weekly was absent from the mini-me. However, that kind of honesty seemed to slip through the cracks as I moved out on my own and broke from the family nest.

I stopped being honest, that’s it! I made it up as I went along and tried the best I could to mask any parts of me that might have reared its ugly head during the painful maturation process.

So, until I hit thirty, I found myself hiding. Yes, I think that’s it, hiding. Here’s the best way to describe hiding in America as a young man. Play music. Grow your hair. Get extreme to the point of structured radicalism. Get pissed at things you cannot control, like international mistreatment of foreign citizens by your government and other governments. Just mainly get pissed, really pissed at everything. When you get bored of this, freely practice getting pissed at being pissed.

During this time, treat other people like characters in a play, especially those of the opposite sex, who are more than a little confused at their own place in the world. You can also throw in the odd use of drugs or alcohol, and mostly fill up what’s remaining of your mushy brain matter with reams of pop culture and volumes of Kurt Vonnegut.

Then go to work in the most disgusting forms of journalism. By this time you cut your hair, put down the guitar for a meager form of subsistence and begin to sink yourself into the fantasy world of sports journalism. More hiding; but with less angst and a better level of car and girl and friend.

Not to say, I did not meet the finest humans on the planet while practicing my hiding and making anger into some semblance of art, its just that for every pearl there is too much swine.

But hey, I don’t want to hear any pansy shit about the Marines or Special Forces. If you could send me back in a time machine to Brooklyn or Greenwich Village or Freehold or the Jersey Shore or Trenton or Philly or those original far-off days at the Putnam Bunker, I’d gather up all those crazy motherfuckers and ship us all to Baghdad right now and prepare for victory. But enough about my twenties.

Man, I loved turning thirty, because for a manic of infinite changes, the flip on the age odometer means regressing back into the hiding state, but this time with eyes wide open. In other words, try being nineteen again, but with a hell of a lot more cash, experience and a better vocabulary in which to skew your new version of pissed. I don’t know about anyone else, but for the likes of me, this is a highly evolved state a nirvana.

And it was during my thirties that I got down to really writing. Not pretending to write, or living like I wanted to have written; just balls to the wall, no white flags, burn down the fucking highway writing. Bad writing. Good writing. Book writing. Talk about writing. Sleep writing. Dream writing. Sex, laugh, fools gold writing.

Yes, a writer. Like I once wrote in my middle-school yearbook, like I wished when I was falling asleep on some beach half out of my head, like I talked about with everyone who would listen. Living in the swirl of events and not giving a pile who the hell cared. But 40? Jesus, how long do they expect me to live?

I guess if I’m lucky, I’ll have a few hundred more lives. Some of my fellow compatriots weren’t so fortunate. After all, hiding has its casualties.

One hundred more lives, huh? Maybe that means a few more times to die. So, I’d like to conclude by thanking all those people who came to my many funerals. See ya at the next one hundred. Hopefully.

Now where are my hiding shoes?

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The Bonzi Conspiracy

August 21, 2002 by James Campion in Pop Culture | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 8/21/02 REALITY CHECK

THE BONZI CONSPIRACY

Internet spying by the CIA, FBI and the Nike Corporation has reached new levels of paranoia and mayhem in the aftermath of 9/11. The dedicated crew of the Reality Check News & Information Desk has compiled several smoking guns as to how government organizations, corporate recognizance and diabolical Arab nations have used software, downloads and subtle forms of subconscious propaganda to infiltrate the minds of web surfing Americans.

The following is a public service warning from our own computer guru and web double agent, G-Padre, the Godfather of Spam, and the Duke of Hacking. Seems the cute purple gorilla icon known to insiders as the Bonzi Buddy is an egregious breech in security for Internet users, as well as a blatant mockery of the 4th Amendment.

The potential evil of this “Bonzi” was first revealed to me through several scathing E-mails disseminated by the legendary Chief Wonka, who in his haste to destroy Bonzi as a tool of oppression inadvertently fingered him to the cyber press. But since everyone has lost their shirt on tech stocks in the last fifteen months, and many Internet police have been sacked, the only way to implicate those barons behind this insidious plot was to communicate with G-Padre through code.

Please be advised that this type of intricate emissary tactics have been kept from the public for decades. The same kind of language can be found in hidden documents regarding the planning of D-Day, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the ensuing Kennedy Assassination, the botched Waco infiltration and detailed paparazzi communication during the recent Liza Minnelli wedding.

“I said fuck Bonzi….whitey!!!!!!!!!!! Another plot from the man to monitor my computer you fascist fuck hole!!!!“

The transmission, although crude and often offensive, is a glimpse into international intrigue and rogue agents of badass journalists. It begins with a veiled discussion about the implicated desktop icon, Bonzi, but deteriorates into what appears to the untrained eye as a blathering piss fight between drunken street gangstas. But although crack cocaine has run high among top-level CIA informants, be assured the security of your civil rights hangs in the balance of this ostensibly innocuous conversation.

Special agent Tork, an agent of unknown origin, joins G-Padre, a Korean expatriate for this revealing transmission. The names and places have been hidden for legal purposes. To decipher the code-speak of these men, it is best to clear the mind of all preconceptions of accepted diction and coherence.

As the great mathematician, Lewis Carroll once wrote, “We are now through the looking glass.”

Somewhere in the Western Hemisphere:

Tork: Did you use your Bonzi Buddy today?

G-Padre: Fuck Bonzi, you cocksucker.

T: Are you denying your everlasting love and devotion to the Lord Bonzi??

G: I said fuck Bonzi….whitey!!!!!!!!!!! Another plot from the man to monitor my computer you fascist fuck hole!!!!

T: Fuck yo momz, Bonzi ain’t no narc like P-Diddy. Get wit da bomb, k- dag.

G: What do you know CRACKER??!!!!!!! Round mother fuckin eye!!! Stay out of the ghetto mofo or get sprayed.

T: Listen you poser, muthafucka, jump back or get a smack daddy back to the ghetto blaster! There is nobody like the Bonzi when the deal goes down, cumputa boyeee!!!!

G: DTAI – BAI, you wack-ass cracker. Stay your ass out da hood!

T: DA HOOD? What you know about the boogie down, cribble beatch? It’s Bonzi’s world and you’re renting!! Whatcha think of that, punk tech slut??

G: Who are you talking to you cumputa slut. Stop tricking the cyber hood bitch. Bonzi pimps you!!!

T: LOVE BONZI or DIE BONZI – know it, be it, live it, gutta ho!!

G: Reppin 845 straight out da projects bitch. Nigga what?? Thug life, kid, thug life. —yo, tootie pussy ass black mofo!

T: Check da time and do the crime, if ya’ll can stands the heat at 108 and counting, muffin muncher!!!!

G: Uncle Tom get da step bitch.

T: Get dat weak-ass, k-dawg shit offa my cumputer skizzie, or you will be cueing up for statistics! And keep your time on this work “ORIGINAL SPEC” BITCH!

G: Take your yoga and shove it up your ass. Walk on coals motherfucker? Try walking in the hood at night and then be proud.

T: Listen, jungle telly, almond-eyed bitch, you think you escaping the Bonzi threat of the day in your midday slumber!!! Think again, mutha humpa!! Fight the power. Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. Don’t get it twisted, Bonzi trick.

G: Yo, buffalo soldier, don’t worry ’bout a ting, man.

T: Dat’s the Jah lookin afta ya, not Bonzi. He is da white man’s lord & savior — son of kong, don’t ya know? Git wit it, rastah!! One love, one world lets get together and feel all right.

G: Straight from Babylon with gaze trees bitch. Keep it gansta. Keep it gator.

T: BABB –BE ABOUT BONZI BITCH!!!

G: Fuck the po po, mutha humpa. Bonzi be a cop killa, cheap ho, lap-ass barracuda bitch – fo po, yo!!

T: G’s up, ho’s down. Bonzi ho – peace out.

G: Righteous clean.

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Will Baseball Shut Down in 2002?

August 14, 2002 by James Campion in Sports | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 8/14/02 REALITY CHECK

THE TOYS OF SUMMER (Musings on the Destruction of the 2002 Baseball Season)

This chic philosophy that Major League baseball has somehow been irrevocably ruined because the All-Star Game ended in a tie or the players are jacked up on all kinds of steroids or no one in the greater Kansas City area could not give half a shit about the Royals or the New York Yankees are run like a veracious corporate monstrosity or Ted Williams’ kids are currently carving up his frozen corpse for a QVC extravaganza begs argument.

Here’s mine:

Major League Baseball is already ruined. It happened long before this year, which hangs by a thread by the way – no matter what the loud, funny Sportscenter cretins say or the silly nicotine-stained sports writers send to copy. MLB is run like beer night at the Alabama Commerce Concern, complete with whooping truckers and a tipsy Jugs Larue. Its Commissioner is an overt lackey while its Players Association resembles Hitler’s third draft of the Blitzkrieg.

In 1994 this bawdy combination shut down a $9 billion industry. The owners couldn’t stop themselves from spending our money. The players couldn’t be helped taking it. The result: No World Series.

The trial for baseball will always be the have’s and have not’s. And that shall never die. Not as long as there are all these teams in cities that do not need, want or deserve baseball.

I was on the frontlines then. Inside the mayhem, bruised by the fallout. I hosted two sports talk shows, one on radio, one on local television in Westchester, NY. I was a sports columnist for a solid weekly and putting the finishing touches on the fourth season of an interview program celebrating the national pastime called “The X-TRA Inning.” To say the ’94 Baseball Lockout fucked me but good is an understatement of Biblical Proportions.

I had the goods on that bit of public relations propaganda. A lot of us grungy sports types did. The truth came hard and fast that summer, and none of it was pleasant. The results of my nightmare can be found in my second book, so I shan’t relive its massive wounds again.

The truth is, what we learned that dim autumn is that MLB is one of those strange American institutions like Fast Food Addiction or Puritanical Voyeurism. It’s both spectacle and business. But the business part keeps the spectacle part solvent, and like most businesses, money is the only line, bottom or otherwise.

For seventy odd years the owners held fast to the economic hammer. The past thirty-five or so, the players have kept a powerful grip on it. Throughout the money flowed, and still flows, regardless what dipshits like Larry Dolan or Bud Selig or that miserable jack-off who runs the Arizona Diamondbacks pass off as truth.

Selig, the aforementioned “lackey commissioner” comes out every few months to claim half the teams are going bankrupt. Then when the Boston Red Sox franchise was for sale this past winter he teamed with those floating the interesting notion that selling to the third highest bidder was “good for the game”. When the league spoke of contracting two teams a few months back – a sober choice considering these three-martini troglodytes added teams in a gluttonous rampage of avarice for twenty years to gain a sizable windfall, which nearly turned high-performance art into the first six minutes of Bull Durham – Selig suggested that the Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins must go.

Montreal was an interesting choice for a baseball city in 1969, hardly the heartland of hardball, but a noteworthy attempt to reach out to our northern neighbors. But when American greed got the best of the game in 1994, not only did the paltry attendance numbers dive in Montreal, it plummeted in previously booming Toronto as well. Montreal was a no brainer to get axed.

Minnesota, however, had a deeper realm of reasoning for the commissioner. Seems not only does Selig’s family own the interest in the Milwaukee Brewers, a regional competitor of the Twins, but its owner, Carl Pohlad, is also a close buddy. Pohlad needed to get out of a nasty lease in the dome his team plays in, and Selig needed more hungry baseball fans to fill his own shiny new (mostly empty) ballpark.

This bit of fun loving insider trading was not unlike 1994 when Selig pulled a mass charade of “baseball is doomed” paranoia by using the relocating interest of California franchise owners and George Steinbrenner’s dangling legal troubles to kick-start the coup d’état that nearly destroyed the game.

Damn it! I tried to stay away from ’94, but it’s getting harder with every sentence. The mood is about the same these days, but something in the heart of the game says it’s not automatic that work another stoppage will lead to baseball’s nuclear winter. Speculation seems to point to the country’s mood approaching the anniversary of 9/11 and the resulting quagmire economy as reasons why clearer heads will prevail.

My own sources, paltry as they are since I do not skulk around with the big boys in the game any longer, tell me the horizon is actually brighter than I’m inclined to predict. At least the principles are agreeing that something needs to be fixed, just that they have no clue how to fix it.

No matter. The trial for baseball will always be the have’s and have not’s. And that shall never die. Not as long as there are all these teams in cities that do not need, want or deserve baseball. These people who whine incessantly about how certain teams cannot compete with New York and Los Angeles and Chicago do not realize that this is not going to change. And no amount of revenue sharing and luxury tax and salary caps are going to change that.

Why is it so important that there are teams in Florida or Texas or Ohio? Less teams means better players available, leading to less money for the mediocre players. Sane salaries. Liquid franchises. Competitive balance. Trash the atavistic antitrust exemption and force these owners to deal with competition in Washington DC, Charlotte or New Jersey, all lucrative sports areas.

Simple as that.

You see what these pro “small market team” shills will fail to tell you is if everything were hunky dory these owners would not take their profits and savings and lower ticket prices or tee shirt prices or hot dog prices. Nope. They’d turn around and buy other interests somewhere and ruin that too. It’s what they do. They can’t help it. It’s like watching dramatized documentary footage of dinosaurs trying to yank their enormous frames from a tar pit, painful, but intriguing in its self-destruction.

Here’s what’s going to happen. Somewhere along the line this mess is going to end up in court. It always seems to. Then the players will win, the owners will eat crow, open the gates and make boatloads of money. Those who are sick of it will sell their franchises for a huge profit and the next group will gladly hop aboard to bitch and moan. Then the Yankees will win the World Series, and everything will be right with the world; or at least in the Bronx and for those of us up at Fort Vernon.

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The Doomed Economy

August 7, 2002 by James Campion in Politics | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 8/7/02 REALITY CHECK

ALL TOGETHER NOW…RECESSION!!

Freshly returned from our nation’s capitol where it was far easier to locate a urine-free bus than it was to get someone to say the word recession out loud. Sure, they’ll mumble it in the pubs or back-office restrooms or cheap apartment elevators. Cabbies will mention it, or maybe someone on the radio might use it in an ad campaign, but no one culling a check in the political realm dare utter the word, least of all Republicans, who are so frightened about losing the House right now it is unnervingly palpable.

Reportedly, House leader, Dick Armey spent nearly 72 hours locked in his office with several key members of the Security and Exchange Commission struggling to produce contrary evidence to growing rumors that every major accounting firm bankrolling current Republican campaigns has a 50% crook rate. The three-day summit allegedly produced over 300 names of corporate attorneys currently under indictment for some kind of fraud.

Surprisingly, Democrat trepidations far outweigh GOP concerns. Scheduled speeches by Al Gore has rendered the party dumbfounded on how to stop this maniac from creeping from the 2000 wreckage to somehow claim defacto victory again and begin to surge the electorate back into the notion that somehow a reversal of fate means a reversal of fortune. No Dem annalist worth a damn wants Gore screwing up this free ride to election bliss when the bottom has fallen out of the Bush honeymoon.

No one wants to admit that there is a massive pink elephant sitting on the White House lawn. Yet there it is. And it is a veracious beast willing to stomp and pillage for any kind of recognition. We shall call the elephant Recession.

Actually “fear” may not be the right word to describe the atmosphere in Washington D.C. these days. The overall mood is best described with the phrase “grave doom”. And it is an Edgar Allen Poe type of doom, with ravens and corpses and women in black veils, a cocaine nightmare worthy of 19th century gothic horror. Painful whispers abound that the evil black cat is out of the bag and the big business lawyers hold all the cards and the president is some kind of cheap, knock-off of dear old dad and the crippled American dollar will be the death knell for this one-term hell.

Grave doom.

Believe me when I report that there is not a person within a ten mile radius of Capitol Hill with an ounce of responsibility willing to face anything involving the corporate lunacy that comes pouring in daily. It is a city in suspended animation. Not even the papers report anything worthy any longer. The Washington Post has been neutered by international wireless dealerships and Sam Donaldson is whipping up support for a major lawsuit against ABC News.

The emergence of something called the Corporate Fraud Task Force raised some eyebrows, but they mostly belonged to the Homeland Security dissenters who choose to view this latest government spend spree as tantamount to placing the odd band-aid on a gaping wound. Two days before the announcement a crazed executive at AOL/ Time Warner began leaking news that the partnership was bankrupt.

Meanwhile the unemployment rate is soaring, the stock market is farcical at best and the national debt continues to escalate by the millisecond. No one wants to admit that there is a massive pink elephant sitting on the White House lawn. Yet there it is. And it is a veracious beast willing to stomp and pillage for any kind of recognition.

We shall call the elephant Recession, because that is what you call it when the above-mentioned areas of economic pertinence begin to waver like a weakly constructed shack in the wind. And the elephant is a fitting metaphor for what the present Republican government has wrought on this economy.

Strike that. The federal government has very little to do with a weak and insecure economy. But that’s not what voters think, and in Washington, that is all that matters now. It is too close to Labor Day to believe that anything will change drastically enough to convince the populace that this present government has not crippled this country, nor will they have a clue how to fix it.

Forget comparing this abortion to the Clinton years when phony tech stocks and blathering foreign business men with a cadre of hookers and pound of grade A smack could earn an evening in the Lincoln bedroom with Bobby De Niro and Babs Streisand to help toast the best economy in the history of this republic. Yeah, that doesn’t count, because it was Newt Gingrich and the Republican congress of ’94 that saved the decade. Although that bullshit doesn’t hold water anymore, because we still have a Republican congress and another fucking Bush dingus on Pennsylvania Avenue and, guess what, junior? We have another recession.

Not to worry, because no one is calling it that. Not Allen Greenspan or Paul O’Neill. No way. Not them. The Secretary of Treasury makes an appearance on national television to report that all is well, while his colleagues in the administration call him names in an Alexandria weekly.

Last week, Bush’s economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey was seen twice trashing O’Neill on the campus of GW University. The hilarious series of outbursts bore the oft-quoted phrases “Lost in a sea of Pollyanna” and “Hasn’t been to Wall Street since 1989”. This prompted Glenn Hubbard, Bush’s big gun on the Council of Economic Advisers to call Newsweek with a statement on Lindsey they still refuse to run because “It borders on slander.”

The minute Congress passed the Corporate Responsibility bill, following a barrage of calls to the White House derisively commenting on Bush’s veiled attempt at a speech to bolster confidence in the trade market, Hubbard was seen stumbling out of a private men’s club in Logan Circle stammering something about having been cursed by a jade monkey.

To ward off the evil spirit of Herbert Hoover, the administration announced an economic forum to be hosted by the president in mid-August. Unfortunately the location will be Waco, Texas, a place that has enough unstable spirits to fill a Dickens novel twice over.

History is important to the large players inside the Beltway. This is why the panic strikes deep across party lines.

Aside from his rousing series of “evil doers” speeches in the wake of 9/11, Bush has had about as inauspicious first two years as his predecessor, who managed to swing wide the doors of the Republican Revolution. And no one in the party wants to even broach the way George Bush sr. ignored the signs of a sagging economy basking in the glory of his gaudy Desert Storm popularity numbers.

Just because the guys in the expensive suits refuse to address this wounded economy with the word recession, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. One thing that does exist is the very real possibility that whatever it’s called could effectively murder two Bush presidencies.

 

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Inside the Bush Administration

July 24, 2002 by James Campion in Politics | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 7/24/02 REALITY CHECK

BARE KNUCKLE JUNGLE

Hazy and buzzed, a pertinent GOP insider we like to call Georgetown continues to unload his guts about a variant of subjects to an equally soused columnist.

jc: So, correct me if I’m drifting here, but what you are saying is the Bush Administration, while not directly linked to any current corporate malfeasance, is suffering the political consequences purely by association.

GT: That would be correct.

jc: Constituency meltdown.

GT: Something like that.

jc: Who’s worried and how much?

GT: There have been discussions, certainly for Bush to get out there and say something. He’s treated this thing like the Middle East crisis, but this one hits too close to home. (NOTE: A few days later the president in fact did make a speech deriding the current climate of bad business, prompting critics and supporters to wonder how much of it was politically motivated and the approaching mid-term elections)

jc: What about Chaney and these crazy rumors about Arthur Anderson and the oil stuff?

GT: Listen, Chaney is untouchable right now. There are a lot of us who would go to bat for him over Bush. I think many conservatives in this town are having the same problems with Junior as they had with Senior. There is a survival chip in the Bush genes that rub the hardliners the wrong way.

The money flooded into defense since 9/11 is staggering. I cannot recall being here during a time, and this does not include Reagan mind you, but I cannot recall the type of major league funds for a war effort being juggled around the federal government like these.

jc: What about you? Where do you stand on Bush’s conservative record?

GT: I think I’ve mentioned the inordinate amount of funds wasted on this ambiguous Homeland Security thing. And I’m not sure the money spent on the military right now is founded. I believe…and again, you’re just asking me, right?

jc: Right.

GT: Well, the vouchers thing was a mess. And there seems to be cracks in the tax cut support on Capitol Hill right now. The money flooded into defense since 9/11 is staggering. I cannot recall being here during a time, and this does not include Reagan mind you, but I cannot recall the type of major league funds for a war effort being juggled around the federal government like these. And this incessant wrangling over disclosure. I have yet to see one of these cable news networks get a fucking story right when it goes down. And they want Rumsfeld to brief them on where operations in Afghanistan are? Sure, right.

jc: Is Rumsfeld still running this thing?

GT: Another dumb ass reporter heard from. I read that garbage you wrote about Rumsfeld being clinically insane and my somehow lauding it. That was bullshit journalism.

jc: You didn’t leave me that message about his wild-eyed performance on Meet The Press last spring?

GT: Out of context. I was referring to his grit in the face of ridiculous assertions that we are mired in Afghanistan. That couldn’t be further from the truth. This man has his finger in the dam. You think this thing is being orchestrated from Pennsylvania Avenue?

jc: It’s the CIA’s puppy now?

GT: Afghanistan or the whole thing?

jc: Afghanistan.

GT: Yes.

jc: And the whole thing?

GT: They’re too busy negotiating with the anti-Hussein factions in Irag.

jc: The White House is preoccupied with Iraq completely?

GT: The roll call is as follows. Write this down, because I’m not repeating it. One: the mid-term campaigns. They’re definitely worried about the Senate. Two: This bullshit with Worldcom finishing up quickly, and with very little discernable press. And by that I mean understandable by the American people. Remember, the frustration of selling Whitewater is that no one could figure out what the fuck it was all about. That’s why Starr went full force on Lewinsky, and…fuck it. I’m off the path. Finally, three is the goddamn stock market and four is Iraq.

jc: What about Israel?

GT: I can tell you that this government, as presently constituted, will not support a unilateral negotiation with the Palestinians while Arafat is in charge.

c: Word I get is he’s not in charge now.

GT: You answered your own question. The same people who managed 9/11 bankroll Hammas. They run the deal over there. We’ve known that for some time.

jc: What about all this money we have wrapped up in the Israeli Defense Force?

GT: Those people have to defend their nation.

jc: How much can you tell me about support for ousting Hussein.

GT: It’s big on our end. The Pentagon already had ten or twelve plans nixed and reworked. That’s not the issue.

jc: The surrounding Arab states have always been the issue. That’s why he’s still there in the first place. God, I am so tired of talking about this.

GT: Why did you bring it up?

jc: I need to know about the real deal. Do they plan on going through with a full-scale attack with troops and the whole bit or keep driving at a coup based on unrest.

GT: The latter. Half, no, more than half of the Iraqi populace is truly afraid of Hussein now. The intelligence we get daily is this maniac is willing to fry the whole desert for a whiz bang finish. I think I’ve told you before, the CIA has always been certain that if Hussein thought he was fucked, he would detonate everything he’s got.

jc: Which is…?

GT: The mother load, if our reports are somewhat in the ballpark. I don’t know anything for sure, and I know you’re taping this, so let’s just say it is not good.

jc: How much does Daschle want the presidency?

GT: Jesus, what a fucking suck-ass, dried out old liberal hump this guy is. He does not give a flying fuck about national security, the stock market plummeting, corporate distrust or anything but jacking up these talk shows to bash the cause. It’s fucking criminal. I’ll not answer another question about Tom Daschle. He’s a political dead man. I think you know I believe they’ll run Kerry up the flagpole and lose.

jc: What do you hear about Gore?

GT: Your boy’s going to petition.

jc: Petition?

GT: Al Gore, the sitting vice president for the administration that lorded over the best non-war economy in the history of this republic, who couldn’t even win his own state and went out in a whining blaze of shame by crying foul, is begging for a sniff. They call it taking the temperature of the party.

jc: He’s auditioning for the party?

GT: Just like Nixon in ’68.

jc: The parallels continue to be uncanny. So, he’s a dead man too?

GT: If I’m not mistaken, it was an open casket funeral two autumns ago.

jc: Are you guys retaining congressional power this November?

GT: Unless something dramatic happens with this economy by mid-September, then no. Of course Bush could pull out the violins and get everyone teary for a 9/11-anniversary tribute to America’s resolve. We can ride that into the sunset.

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Inside Georgetown

July 17, 2002 by James Campion in Politics | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 7/17/02 REALITY CHECK

A MID-SUMMER NIGHT’S STANDOFF

For the past six months I had not heard a peep from my infamous GOP insider, Georgetown, at least not in the usual sense; the occasional caustic message on my cell phone or a chance meeting at some function or other. This is odd, considering his repeated appearances in this column for nearly five years. Odder still, when considering that Washington has ostensibly turned into a Republican headquarters for the past two of them.

However his absence becomes clearer when viewed through a political lens. Georgetown is nothing if not a political monster, and since I’d left the New York headquarters of The Desk, my appearances at political or sporting events have waned considerably. And so my running into him or someone with access to him has lessened greatly. Georgetown had not heard of a fundraiser or a press conference he didn’t like, which is why he enjoyed a continued anonymity in this space, and a direct voice for his madness. I, in turn, have come to enjoy his wickedly honest and accurate assessment of national politics.

I’ve spent my free time mostly away from frontline politics lately, paining to finish a well-overdue manuscript for my next book. So I’d more or less assumed that Georgetown had little to no use for me or this column. Moreover, it has been tentative times in our nation’s capitol, what with the infinite “War Against Terrorism” and the crippling of Wall Street with these repeated corporate cover-ups. Especially damaging to a president who was bankrolled into office by big business interests and grotesque oil funding.

However, about three weeks ago I began receiving cryptic E-mails from someone with the title of GT through an anonymous Hot Mail account. The notes had Georgetown’s recognizably vitriolic tone, but with very little of the usual wit, one-line commentaries on past columns, much like the ones I receive from any rankled reader.

Chaney is in deep with Arthur Anderson. Bush has the stench of these oil bastards all over him. Christ, he has to start talking about this shit. It will cost us seats in the Senate and then you’ll see where his “compassionate conservatism” gets us.

Examples:

“You twisted hack, what is the point of dissecting the (Bush) administration’s Middle East policies when they do not exist?”

“You have little to know idea what kind of godless twits roam in the offices of Bob Kerry these days.”

“Time to come to grips with the fact that Worldcom is run by wild, fuck-crazy Arabs who wish to sink the U.S. economy from within.”

“You’ve got a better chance of making deadline under 600 words, than anyone has of hearing the identity of Deep Throat, least of all from that puny douchebag stoolie, John Dean.”

“This bullshit about the “Pledge” (of Allegiance) is beneath you, so why don’t you stick to speculating about gay rights in Bergen County.”

Cute, pointless, and highly provocative, I decided these almost daily barbs were Georgetown’s attempt at riling my attention, without fully coming out of hiding. I balked at mentioning this in my column until I had a beat on his methods, which unpredictably alter with the political wind these days. And I surely did not want this space to turn into some kind of running libel machine for the upcoming mid-term panics that rumble down the streets Washington around this time every four years.

And so it seemed right to track down the old boy in D.C. during our nation’s celebration of Independence. It had been a few years for me actually “working” inside the Beltway. That takes a different kind of breed, younger, hungrier, willing to be lied to incessantly, until all manner of faith is rendered impotent in its wake. It takes the guile and fortitude of a reporter with at least a modicum of optimism, of which I have traded for using the “F” word liberally.

But that is why this trek was so necessary, so vital to the continued vitality of this column. Truth has always been the mantra of Georgetown, and although he has incurred the wrath of many who already know he is selling them out, he blabs and barks and carves with the best of them.

Unable to reveal the methods in which I weed out sources, to protect their cover and keep the gravy train greased and fired up, suffice to say the double-vodka martini is a good place to start. So the following is the first of a two-part discussion that took place in a darkened booth in the back of Chadwick’s Pub somewhere along K Street in the part of our nation’s capitol that bares our friend’s name. It is a fine bar for a summit on mid-term madness and all things politico.

jc: I want you to know I missed deadline tracking you down.

GT: That’s the least of your problems. This is a bad time to be here. Didn’t you hear; the Arabs are going to fire missiles at the Capitol building from Arlington Cemetery during the fireworks?

jc: Is this directly from Tom Ridge?

GT: Yes, the Grand Poobah of Homeland Defense. We call him Chicken Little Junior down here. He’s sucking millions of taxpayer dollars foraging out angry love letters from Muslim law students and leaking germ warfare memos to the State Department on the hour.

jc: Enough fucking around, where have you been?

GT: Fucking around? You need a beating after that “Pledge of Allegiance” mess I see is running this week. Was that bit of insurrection planned for the holiday?

jc: Please. You’re and atheist.

GT: Yeah, I loved that crap about taking God off of money. You miss the point entirely. God is money.

jc: Let’s get back to your absence from my answering machine. Is it the doomed economy under this Republican “big business” government we’ve got going on down here?

GT: You see this is why the press has no fucking idea what is going on. Perception is king, and I know that, but the question will be over the next two months does this administration know how cozy it is with these companies that keep cooking the figures and floating belly up on the shores of the Potomac. Chaney is in deep with Arthur Anderson. Bush has the stench of these oil bastards all over him. Christ, he has to start talking about this shit. It will cost us seats in the Senate and then you’ll see where his “compassionate conservatism” gets us.

jc: How deep in is this Worldcom fiasco? Has it reached Enron proportions politically?

GT: It doesn’t matter. The more these trials drag on, and new miscreants are dragged out to testify, the more the public has the perception that everyone, not just the politicians; everyone is bought and sold by these massive corporations.

jc: Guilt by association?

GT: The fattest hens always come home to roost.

Next Week: Bare Knuckle Jungle

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God & The Pledge of Allegiance

July 3, 2002 by James Campion in Politics | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 7/3/02 REALITY CHECK

COURTS A-GO-GO

This was banner week for controversial court decisions. So let’s cut through the piles of crap and get to the brutal truth. The mandatory reading of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional.

This is the ruling of U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and with respect to those who disagree, I must concur.

The main crux of the decision focused on the monotheistic phrase “one nation under God”. For a myriad of reasons, many will find the rejection of God in anything outrageous, yet, once again, I must agree with the ruling.

This has nothing to do with political correctness. Anyone familiar with my work would never mistake it for anything approaching polite. It has everything to do with the reference to God.

God should not be mentioned in anything to do with the politics of humanity, its governments, its currency, its anthems, or especially the aggressive, violent behavior resulting from their existence. God is causing enough troubles among the radical loons, who are busy ramming airliners into office buildings.

A fairer argument against this ruling might cite the “one lone nut” theory, which I have espoused when soccer moms try and shut down the film or music industry because they’re too lazy to pay attention to the information seeping into their kid’s brain.

God should not be mentioned in anything to do with the politics of humanity, its governments, its currency, its anthems, or especially the aggressive, violent behavior resulting from their existence.

Ironically, much like the PMRC furor of the mid-80s’, one voice began this “pledge” hubbub. Michael Newdow, a Sacramento physician, used his daughter as a political football to promote atheism. In other words, he, and his layers, manipulated the court system to attack religious bullies, while he himself was, you guessed it, an anti-religious bully.

Newdow was “offended” by his nation being under any deity. His argument is specious. It is not his nation. It is not God’s nation. A nation, by definition, is “a large body of people possessing its own territory ruled under a unified government.” There is nothing in there about an omnipotent patriarch or any whining dipshits from Cali.

And, by the way, I’m not certain this is a unified government, or that there is “liberty and justice for all”. But let’s not quibble at this juncture. There’s a great deal to cover this week, so I shan’t wander.

The fact is a fellow by the name of Francis Bellamy plagiarized the Pledge of Allegiance. It was ripped off word for word from a socialist mantra. He put it together to reflect his cousin, Edward Bellamy’s political views. Bellamy, author of “Looking Backward” and other wildly silly utopian novels, introduced his cousin to the mindless oath to state above and beyond individual freedoms and personal choices of import, like, say, religion.

This is why congress decided to jam God in there during the height of the Cold War and the rabid idiocy of the Red Scare. It was far too close to the Russian creed, and certainly no God fearing nation could have a similar chant to that of a Godless horde.

Stay with me kids; the parade of morons along this long line of brainwashing garbage never seems to end.

Meanwhile, over at the Supreme Court, a ruling came down approving random drug tests for any public high school students seeking extracurricular activities. The defense of the ruling states that a schools’ interest in ridding their campuses of drugs outweighs an individual’s right to privacy.

This is beyond insane.

Now, not familiar with the modes of mental illness nor the state one has to be in usurp even insanity, there really isn’t a level of absurd reasoning that combines any part of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment with the idea that any institution, state run or private, can arbitrarily force anyone to be tested for anything just so they can play the Tuba or audition for the “H.M.S. Pinafore”.

And, once again, I implore those who pain over this high-level malarkey; any kid on drugs isn’t interested in hanging around for five seconds of extra anything near the school. It’s tough enough getting these youngsters to attend the appointed time. They would be better served testing those not interested in extracurricular activities.

Here’s the deal with this sack of nonsense. Because everyone went crazy-go-nuts over steroid use in high school football a few years back, the Supreme Court attempted to “save the children’ by instituting “random drug testing” for sports. Now, it seems, junior won’t be making the Chess Club without supplying a viable urine sample.

Perhaps now someone might understand why I froth at the mouth every time these legal jerk-offs try and censor anything to “save the children’. One minute they’re putting stickers on albums and leaning on Hollywood, the next they’re burning books at the 4th of July cookout.

This latest mess began when a court ruled against a former Oklahoma high school honor student, Lindsay Earls, who innocently competed on an academic quiz team and sang in the choir.

I propose we randomly test these mutants who continue to misrepresent American history as some kind of destined glory for rich white folk and pass it off as curriculum.

And I propose that calculus is better digested on heavy hallucinogenics.

And finally, this whole School Voucher thing in Cleveland cannot be anymore aggravating. I don’t want to fund anyone anywhere receiving a “finer” education, unless I am asked to approve the curriculum and set the standards for attendance and grading.

I also would like special parking privileges as a member of a school board. These people obviously do nothing, and I can get into that.

I have a voucher that says that the Catholic and public school systems failed me in ways that are best understood only when drawn out in several volumes with detailed graphics and charts.

And if televised evidence of a Cleveland Browns football game is any indication of the city’s level of intellect, they shouldn’t waste a dime on hall monitors.

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In Defense of the American Bully

June 26, 2002 by James Campion in Pop Culture | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 6/26/02 REALITY CHECK

IN DEFENSE OF THE AMERICAN BULLY

According to a bizarre, but apparently all too true, report printed in Reuters this past week, the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates has decided to rile up a “bullying awareness” movement. The country’s largest doctor’s conclave plans on urging fellow colleagues to inform parents of this growing epidemic. According to the group’s extensive report, one out of ten kids are victims of bullying. Nearly 15% of children are bullies, and more than half of those have been, or currently are, being bullied.

Last year the AMA’s Council on Scientific Affairs concluded that without intervention, “bullying can lead to serious academic, social, emotional and legal problems.”

The push for a national campaign to “stamp out bullying” cites the rash of school shootings in recent years resulting from the relentless abuse of schoolchildren at the hands of each other. Extensive psychoanalyses studies of terrorized children have proven that a significant amount of mental afflictions are suffered by bullying, leading to gnawing psychological problems well into adulthood.

Now, as a diminutive runt, and a victim of years of chronic bullying, I am here to say that any such movement to end bullying in our time is capricious, arbitrary and wrong. It is against every law of nature and yet another example of doctors acting like some kind of supreme beings and jamming statistics wherever they might fit the latest cause.

Here at the Reality Check News & Information Desk, we have done our own studies, many of which were of a particularly painful and personal nature. In fact, in a column entitled, “The Truth About Willie & The Underground Sharks” printed in the 2/14/01 issue of this publication, the point was made quite clearly. It began as a response to a letter accusing a close friend, and a main contributor to my last book, Willie, for doling out a series of savage beatings in some downtown NYC rave club.

Following an unprecedented deluge of hate mail, even for this space, the below statement still stands:

“Many kids who gobble Ecstasy find a good beating a welcomed enhancement to the high. There is nothing better than breaking the chains of well-being and peace with a fine stomping at the hands of an anonymous madman whose only purpose in hanging around in the first place is to doll them out like Easter candy.”

Discovery is part of youth, and to discover verbal, physical and mental abuse from another kid is the right of every American child.

The crux of the sentimental piece is what I wish to revisit this week in response to the terrible glut of news coming out of the AMA.

You see, what minions of science can never understand is the natural order of God’s law. It is survival of the fittest and the predatory instinct of humanity to bully. Of course this has been broached here before regarding the freaks that pass themselves off as agents of the Lord to molest children. The real problem with these holy cretins is they haven’t taken enough beatings in their lifetime. The raw element of fear is absence in their hearts. To taste the lash is their wanting.

Face it; the bully holds a special purpose in the grand scheme of “growing up.” Hating another for no reason merely because you can kick them around is the right of the brute in society. Learning this at an early age is not only beneficial to our children, but also important to fuel other basic urges like vengeance and spite. The bully helps put these deranged emotions into perspective during a time in our lives when the only aim is to remain invisible, inconsequential, and hopefully unharmed.

The only harm in bullies is the continued coddling of them in order to come up with intellectual or emotional reasons why children pick on each other incessantly. They do it because the ignorant need an outlet. Discovery is part of youth, and to discover verbal, physical and mental abuse from another kid is the right of every American child. They have so few as it is, don’t take away the playground.

It’s ironic, but a few days before this report was made public I was telling my wife of my days as a Catholic School boy in St. Dominic’s on Van Ness Avenue in the Bronx, NY, and of some little shit heel named Troy who thought it fun to challenge me to a fight every friggin’ day for the first three years of schooling. This was his mistake, and my good fortune, because despite the fact that I was nothing more than a spit-shine momma’s boy with pressed slacks and gooped hair at three foot nothing, I eventually smote him.

You see what Troy did not realize, like most bullies, is that after awhile it really doesn’t matter what they do. There is a sense of “nothing left to lose” that wells up in the human psyche, even at age eight, and not too long into our after-school bouts I was routinely hitting him in the face. And in my extensive study, the only thing that really stops a bully is not a team of doctors, but clean shots to the bridge of the nose or square on the jaw. This produces the greatest stream of blood. My study also revealed that bullies hate that.

Sure, interventions and parental group therapy are nice, but a carefully placed fist to the temple sets the bully straight and gives a lifetime of hope for the bullied. I’ve had plenty of experience with bullies, and it sounds to me like the AMA is bullying us into robbing our kids of childhood’s most precious victory, the ass-whupping of the deserved. Life is about a series of defeating bullies; the sooner we understand it, the better.

It is quite Zen when you think about it. Without pain there can be no pleasure, and without defeat there is no victory.

I conclude with a quote from my 2/19/01 column:

“The underground is filled with natural-selection beasts like Willie, and so are politics and Wall Street and suburbia for that matter. He is the bully, the boogieman, the great equalizer reminding everyone that humanity is not the home of compassion, but the result of brutal evolution, where the strong and maniacal unleash their frustration on those who might live under the illusion that they are somehow more refined or “better” than the rest. We shouldn’t shun or fear them. The idea is to befriend these mutants, pull them close to your bosom and mother their intentions, or at the very least, bring a notebook and study their habits.”

Today I am five foot nothing and encounter bullies of every sort everyday, but thanks to Troy I still keep the notebook and study the habits.

Who’s your Troy?

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What Did Bush Know Before 9/11?

June 5, 2002 by James Campion in Politics | Leave a comment

Aquarian Weekly 6/5/02 REALITY CHECK

THE BLAME GAME

Those who wish to blame the current administration for the abysmally horrid defense of this country’s borders on 9/11 are free to do so.

Go ahead. It’s fun.

You have permission from all of us here at The Desk.

Blame away.

It will not be taken as unpatriotic, nor will it be putting anyone or anything at risk during times and war and blah, blah blah, mucho bullshito! On the contrary, it’s the essence of patriotism. The federal government failed us on 9/11. Its primary purpose is to protect our borders. The leader of this government happens to be the president. The president happens to be George W. Bush. The Electoral College decided that two Novembers ago. The Supreme Court upheld it. I defended its decision. Therefore I defend the right of the people of this republic to blame its penultimate leader for the death of its citizens and destruction of its property during a full-scale terrorist attack.

The buck stops here.”

Harry Truman said that. It was not too long after he agreed to have this country take responsibility for massacring hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese to save hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. Sound confusing? It is. This president thing is not an easy gig. In one of his final public appearances Herbert Hoover was asked about the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and blurted, “Why me?” He died with the stigma of failure and Hoover was in office for eight months when the crud hit the fan. By 9/11, Bush was in charge for nine months.

You see where I’m going here?

All you need to know about Bush’s conscience is that he refuses to allow an investigation on what went down on 9/11. And if he keeps up this firewall, he will be the first president to do so.

Captain Shoe-In wanted to be president. He sure as hell paid for it. So he must take the shit storm like a man and quit hiding behind Papa Chaney, flag-waving, 21-gun salutes and the quote of the week regarding “The Evildoers”.

All you need to know about Bush’s conscience is that he refuses to allow an investigation on what went down on 9/11. And if he keeps up this firewall, he will be the first president to do so.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, it took all of nine or so days to get an investigation up and running. It was corrupt, misguided and discovered nothing, but FDR stamped it and we went about our business whupping Nazi’s and the doomed Empire of Japan.

Less than a week after the JFK assassination, there needed to be an investigation. You know, with all the silly commie rumors and Castro backlash. So LBJ gave it the go ahead and now we have volumes of the wonderfully crafted slice of fiction called the Warren Commission.

Even Richard Milhouse Nixon, having already turned his administration into a mockery of governance gone terribly awry, agreed to an investigation.

Oh, now I see, the buck stopped THERE.

So, let’s review:

A. Federal Government fucked up real bad. B. People minding the store have to answer for it. C. What took so long?

Yes, the President of the United States knew all about the attack. Members of congress knew all about the attack. And although it is getting painfully obvious that Tom Daschle is already running for president by making this belated mania a political demon hunt, the same way republicans grabbed the opportunity to chase Bill Clinton all over the place to advance their agenda and careers, he knew all about it too.

They all knew. Who are they kidding? The FBI knew, the CIA, the Pentagon, and those dark sorts on the payroll who are paid good money to funnel information on the “undesirables” and “suspicious”. These are multi-billion dollar a year organizations whose only purpose for existing is paranoia.

Thousands of terrorist and lone wolf plots were thwarted in the final weeks of the last century; the whole Y2K end-of-the-world, wrath-of-God crap. Remember that? Yes, our boys were all over those people, because the enemies’ list has grown leaps and bounds since the end of the Cold War.

And just as I wrote the day after the towers fell in this very space, there was ample warning in Africa and the on the high seas and through E-mail and wire tapping and late night cocktails with King Abdullah What’s-his-Name. For over a decade of Desert Storm fallout, those paid to know were all-but sure that some major target on the East coast was going to be hit.

But professional paranoia was apparently not enough.

Two weeks prior to the attacks I watched about three-quarters of a documentary on PBS trashing American airport and airline security systems. How people with no tickets or ID were prancing around waving pistols and passing high-grade heroin through customs. It was laughable.

Hey, I laughed.

And now that someone, whether it’s a hungry journalist or a politician trying to make the grade, we have a right to know who dropped the ball.

Big money people with big gripes had it in for the United States for some time. Bush Sr’s ridiculously irresponsible war on Iraq 12 years ago, and the resulting botched foreign policy mess conducted by the Minister of Fun during the roaring 90s’ escalated it all.

So the real blame is our collective ignorance and ego as a nation, citizens and public officials. We’ve been in the line of fire for years, whistling past the graveyard.

One more thing to chew:

I defy anyone to recall Al Gore and George Bush mentioning a possible terrorist hit on this country during over a year of campaigning for the job.

Asleep at the wheel, chief.

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