Massive Sack: the mighty logs of kxs

Ask anyone who knows better, and you'll hear that DC is our northernmost southern city. The humidity and the ambient funk betrays this. DC loves the funk. Wouldn't know it crawling around the Capitol Building or inside one of K Street's vanilla Lobby Houses and nearby bar-n-grills. You needed to hit the clubs to hear it-- banging southern funk electronic music in a building full of people who know of no other way than to move all night long to thick drums. It's no coincidence that both Go-Go and Jungle first blew up big in the DC area before spreading across the country. Back when I did my DC dj thing, I used to rotate between the Spy Club, The Bank, and whatever kind of crazy party they had at the Capitol Ballroom (aka The Nation) to get a sense of what was happening. Then I'd go play in Georgetown and turn on the squares.

So go get your f****n' shine box, and your sack of nickels
It tickles, to see you try to be like Mr. Pickles
Daddy fat sacks, B-I-G B-O-I
Same motherf**ka that took them knuckles to your eye

Aight! I played the hell out of ATLiens in part because I wanted to hear the masses scream get your f****n' shine box at two in the morning, but that was a very small part. Lyrics are the weakest component of ATLiens, and the lyrics are nice. But the Organized Noize crew were out of their heads on some Funkadedelic / Mandrill / Chemical Brothers hybrids and apparently they had to commit these sounds to the master tape lest they go insane from twitching feet and heavy loins. ATLiens title track is the epitome of dance funk hip-hop. Millions of heads shall be eternally grateful.

Have I mentioned that spring is coming on for real across the fruity plains of Michigan? I walked out of the Y today in a t-shirt...it was 62 and sunny. The ground is finally free of snow. That's another reason I'm doing ATLiens today, because it's one of the best riding-with-the-top-down-in-the-summer records ever made. The smooth pluck of the Intro to ATLiens sounds like a down-home homily of sorts, the kind of thing you would expect from the dirty south (circa 1969), but by 1996 folks already knew that Outkast and the ATL's Dungeon Family in general were not the generic dirty south / booty bass type of fellows, but something much more. This comes into light when Two Dope Boyz (in a Cadillac) rumbles out from the speakers like a rollicking crunk anthem, long before folks were talking about crunk. Oh, Outkast incorporates those styles because Dre and Big Boi are true to their origins. But black southern music pretty much covers the creation of all good music along the past 100-plus years: Delta Blues, Jazz, Rock-n-Roll, Funk, Soul and newer strains of the aforementioned Booty Bass vibes are all cooked together like a thick funk gumbo with SpaceFunk spices liberally added to the stew. In 1996 we learned that southern hip hop was here to stay.

ATLiens is not as brooding as Aquemini nor as artsy and expansive as Stankonia. ATLiens is an album of two gifted MC's and some dope producers coming to realize that they may just be all that and a bag of chips-- young and brash and confident and full of energy. Even the mellow tracks have the crackle of heat lightning. The combination of confidence and humility, given a good baseline of talent, can take an act a long way. ATLiens may not be as 'artistically' pure or whatever as some of Outkast's later releases, but it is very personal. This record was made when Dre and Big Boi were making a living off their music but they were not rich, even though folks were starting to treat them different, especially girls. Some of you know how that kind of disconnect comes to be.

I'm fascinated by the way yo
nipples peak at me through yo blouse
freaky me, freaky you
can't help but be aroused
'scuse me lord less for thinkin
but that's the way we was brought up
sneakin to watch playboy at night
we all must be caught up in worldly ways
Chemistry between boys and girls
is alot like when we went to the woods
and laid with the squirrels

That's from Babylon, and indicative of another major facet of ATLiens-- recollections of young love, growing up in a dodgy environment, and making a lemon existence, if I can be so hokey, into lemonade. Boy - girl relationships are covered from many angles. From kids with crushes to being brought into the world as a crack baby (Babylon), to the kind of women who help keep little Shawn Kemps running around (Jazzy Belle and Mainstream). Both of the aforementioned tracks are slow to mid-tempo, but still funky enough for that summertime ride through downtown...windows down, fifth of hooch between your thighs and one hand laconically draped over the wheel.

Alternating between conscience raps and gangster rants had been done in hip-hop aplenty by 1996, most remarkably by Nas, but Nas was no where near this funky. I've never thought ATLiens to be a lyrically superior album, much as A Tribe Called Quest was never on the mountain top lyrically, even with varied subject matter. Decatur Psalm is a Dre / Big Boi tagteam about living the ganster life and knowing who to trust...done better by light years on Biggie's Ready To Die and Dr. Dre's Chronic, years earlier, but again, the summer swamp thickness of Outkast's version stays fresh after 100 plays...much as Tribe's best music has held together through time despite less than perfect components.

So the lyrics are maybe a 7 or 8 out of 10. How does this album reach such exalted status? Am I tripping? We could also ask how Tribe get over like they did? It's about the flow. Basically, I could not care less what Outkast is rapping about on ATLiens. For one thing, Dre and Big Boi have that fast-as-hell southern playa flow, which is hard to catch syllable by syllable, and when I actually read through all the lyrics I kinda felt like I had wasted my time. Southern evangelicals have a tradition called speaking in tongues. It happens when the speaker is being touched by the Light, or maybe the first rush of some excellent acid. No matter, that cat will be in the zone-- flowing and spewing with passion and purpose...and it sounds better when the right choir is on hand to keep things moving. You don't really need to think about anything while listening to ATLiens, just be ready to bounce.

I need to get rolling on that durable power of attorney! But for the record, if I'm ever in a hospital bed with a liquefied cerebral cortex, please, don't starve me. Instead I prefer to either be spiked with a half-gallon of good morphine, or if the ambient mood is right, relieved of my gray matter with the help of a bullet or two. Just don't wait fifteen goddamn years to do it.

Good Friday is the perfect day to write anything about wingnut Republicans who have tossed aside their supposed reverence for Federalism and family rights in order to intervene on behalf of one poor lady, who after 15 years in a persistent vegetative state, is being taken off of life support by her husband, over the objections of her parents. Add this with DC's preoccupations with steroids in baseball, gay marriage, and an ongoing ignorant and pointless War on Drugs, and we see a detailed image of Bush's finger-wagging morality crowd placing the word of THEIR GOD over everything, including the Constitution. I'm not even surprised.

It's selective Executive inference at it's lowest. Bush speaks about the Schaivo case but has nothing to say about the worst school shooting since Columbine, or how we're going to energize Social Security AND pay for all his friggin tax cuts. A private family dispute is not place to spend limited Federal Government resources. The legal matter is cut and dry: The Spouse Makes The Call (lesson, know who you are marrying). If Bush were a true Christian, he'd believe that Schaivo's soul was either already in the afterlife, or trapped in a useless body. What's the deal? Bush. Say the name, remember what it means. Here in America, the Bush name means politics above all else. Period.

I don't know about you, but this seemingly innocuous case has turned into a madhouse of wingnuts from all walks of life. It is so full of irony I can hardly contain myself. How is it that the same people in Congress and the White House who were going nutzo about banning gay marriage in order to protect "sanctity" of the family are completely violating it by going over the wishes of the husband who is trying to fulfill the reasonable wishes of his now vegetative wife? And what is it that her parents and all the so-called life protecting nut-jobs know that 24 neurologists don't? Have we finally come to the point where the bible-weilding mob have trumped science and reason?

How can anyone with any shred of legitimacy let the twitchings and involuntary actions of brainstem activity of a vegetable speak louder than than scientific evidence? (the same people who say evolution is bogus and that creationism needs to be taught in public schools). And are we the taxpayer and health care user supposed to sit idly by while money is pumped into a lost cause for the sake of what is no more than a miracle? And when I say miracle, I mean the impossible kind, not the improbably kind, like Larry Bird making a 3 point shot from the other side of the court kind of miracle. We're talking flying pigs. If I recall correctly, the same kind of people who are looking for this miracle are the same kind of people who would burn a woman at the stake if that level of impossibility was breached. It is just all too crazy for me.

The Supreme Court showed some sanity by refusing to step on the toes of lower-court rulings, and by extension, Terri Schiavo's husband. Ignorant assheads are popping up all over cable and the major print media outlets to weigh in about this. Media clowns have helped, along with our elected officials, to turn this private tragedy from sad, to ridiculous, to pornographic. Media whores exploit this story for ratings, and political whores exploit the situation for votes...and legitimacy. Ergo, there is a willing audience for this act. We suck.

Something good will come from this. Laws will be modified to settle right-to-die disputes between spouses and parents. Living wills will become all the rage. I expect to see legal commercials about this any day now...call Sam Bernstien for all your Living Will needs, our staff of professional ambulance chasers will make sure your wishes are carried out...for a reasonable fee of course. Could we maybe go gladiator style and start chucking politicians and lawyers inside a high-fenced arena in front of an angry UFC / rodeo / NASCAR hybrid crowd, all howling for blood and justice? Shit, FOX could make a mint off that. First fight: chainwhip match between Tom Delay and Al Sharpton at Cesars Palace.

Green libertarian types like myself have long appreciated the notion of a smaller federal government and sober financial policies, but the legislated morality bit of today's GOP is too nasty to consume. Bush's folks are spending like speedfreak sailors in Singapore. Medicare entitlements, massive farming subsidies, and imprudent tax cuts have undermined our chances at national solvency. At some point, folks overseas will tire of holding our debt...espcially if the dollar keeps performing like limp fish. Mix fiscal recklessness with the Falwell-on-a-box morality crap and today's G.O.P. looks like a refried pose of the old bigoted Dixiecrat gang from Strom Thurmond's youth, except these wacky bastards are actually in power. No one outside the South took the Dixiecrats seriously. Talk about a dumbing-down process. Is this what network TV and tabloids have done to us?

The power center of modern Republicanism gives me the heebee jeebees, so I usually hold my nose and vote the donkey way, even though THAT party is such a pathetic husk of broken ideas and gimp action items that I can scarcely conjure the courage to speak its name aloud lest I curse something I care about. Al Sharpton, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd and a few dozen others are so radioactive towards good sense and fresh ideas that they should be rounded up, immediately, and sent off to Alaska's North Slope to personally mind the AWNR out of perceptual range from the rest of humanity. They can live off of lichen and Caribou...maybe sign on as oil-hands. They should be surrounded by electric fences. Guarded, electric fences.

We need a third party that stresses the rights and freedoms of individuals. One that takes lobbyists out of the Capitol. One that believes in fiscal discipline. One that believes in legalizing pot. One that believes in in leading by example. One that strives to make sure every child has a chance to compete in today's economy. We need a party where the leaders speak the truth freely. Is there no mass market for such a thing? Have we descended to a point where it's best for me to find a nice place in British Columbia and wait it out?

There's Fredo, there's Sonny and there's Michael. The Godfather handed it over to Michael. I have no problem handing it over to Dwyane. -- Shaquille O'Neal on comparing Penny Hardaway and Kobe Bryant to Dwyane Wade

He's the beloved big man on one of the three best teams in the NBA. His former team will be lucky to make the playoffs. Kobe is the villain. Imagine that happening 5 years ago. Kobe the wonderboy, villain? No way in hell. Then Eagle, CO: Not only was Kobe accused of rape, atop of admitted adultery, but Kobe also sold out Shaq...telling police officers that Shaq paid hush money to women all the time. Tsk tsk. You don't throw your teammates under the bus. You just don't do it. In the mob, that kind of behavior gets you a date with the wood-chipper.

In a way, Kobe has paid a huge a price for all this. No one really likes him any more. ESPN doofus Scoop Jackson came up from a bracing hit of ether to declare that Shaq v. Kobe was like the Biggie / Tupac rivalry. Wrong wrong wrong. Jackson assumes that Kobe has as many admirers as Shaq. That's not true. Shaq might be America's most popular and most loved athlete not named Lebron. Kobe is not loved by anyone outside of LA, and Kobe has zero street cred. He grew up in a soft neighborhood in suburban Philly, and as I've mentioned, he sold out the Deisel to the friggin cops. Man, you get no love for that. You think either Tupac or Biggie would have ratted on the other to the police? No, Shaq / Kobe has all the making of those epic Hulk Hogan / Rowdy Roddy Piper clashes-- the beloved big man against the brooding and insane little firebrand. Yeah, throw a kilt on Kobe and run it by Vince McMahon and you got yourself a nice Pay-Per-View. Shaq / Kobe at this point is superhero versus supervillian, and that's assuming the Lakers will be a 50+ win team next year.

Shaq has gone out of his way to be deferential about, and to, Dwyane Wade. The fact that the two actually seem to like each other only increases the warm-fuzzies, not to mention the sensation that Shaq joining forces with Wade in Miami has shifted considerable power from the Western to the Eastern Conference. There are two teams in the East right now capable of winning the title-- three if Indiana is at full strength. Next year Cleveland and Washington will be stronger, and God knows what will become of the Celtics. They may win 60 or 30 next year. My point is, with Shaq coming to Miami, the East is considered legit after years of yawning or outright mockery from, as Bill Simmons says, the remaining 19 NBA diehard fans.

Has there ever been a more revered big man, especially one who is so much bigger and stronger than everyone else? Chamberlain was never loved like this, though Wilt tried his damndest at lovin'...biblically speaking. Hakeem, one of the nicest fellows in the world, did not get the love Shaq's getting right now. Shaq is the rarest of rarities-- a pimp-dressing, witty, smart, dominating, freakstrong NBA center. These days he's even in shape...which is what pissed Kobe off to start with. The Lakers now play with as much enthusiasm as condemned men. Meanwhile, sometime in the next three years, and as a Pistons fan I hate to admit this, Shaq will go to the finals with his third team, and he'll prolly win another ring or two. What's better is that I think that Dwyane Wade can be a better player than Kobe. He's already pretty close. Wade has great court vision, great hands, and can just explode to the basket with more strength than MJ. This is only Wade's second season. He's going to get better, and he wants to get better, and he wants some rings and Shaq wants more rings. Sometimes, sometimes, people get what they deserve.

I wonder how the Pistons fit in all of this. After all, Detroit is getting better, too. Tayshaun Prince may very well hit all-star status next year, and I'm still convinced that Darko and the Carlos' (Delfino and Arroyo) will be huge factors for the teams for many years. Ben Wallace will soon sign an extension, and Rasheed is, well, Rasheed, and that is what the otherwise vanilla Pistons need. Detroit ought to be at their current level or better for another four to six years...longer if Darko and Defino turn into all-stars. Joe Dumars has constructed a team that plays smothering defense yet can also fly down the court when the situation calls for it. This year I've seen Detroit throw down more dunks than ever before. You gotta love a team that lives by going into the paint. Some of that credit goes to Coach Brown...healing at home, getting up for one for title run before he packs his bags again.

Miami and Detroit. Now that's gonna be a hoot for years, and you'll maybe spare a thought for Kobe that he's missing out on the new epicenter of NBA action? Didn't think so.

Yesterday I needed to gas up the Jeep for a little trip. My regular gas station is about a mile from my house, and the roads between my house and the gas station look like they've been strafed with RPG's...pothole clusters of all sizes and patterns. It's hell on me and my spine, and I drive a big sturdy Jeep. Can't imagine what it's like for some poor simp in a Skylark. That's okay. It's March, and potholes are part of the landscape in Flint. I worry a tad that they may not get fixed, because as you may or may not know, Flint is broke, and a good part of their city government is more twisted, wrongheaded, and corrupt than Lenin's October Revolution cronies. We all know how THAT turned out. Flint's commercial tax base consists of titty bars and liquor stores. Speedy repair of the city's potholes depends on how many people are getting wasted and going to strip clubs. This being Flint, if our public works depends on a lot of vice, I think it'll all work out.

So no matter where I drive in town these days, I'm reminded of the potholes, especially when I fail to dodge a doozy and smack my head on the roof of my vehicle. That's exactly what happened on my way to the gas station. It was also 33f, raining, and just generally crappy outside. Typical Michigan March weather. What I wasn't prepared for was playing giant slalom on the road only to be rewarded by paying a freaking $2.35 a gallon for 89 octane fuel. Christ man, how bad do things have to get before Incurious George and the crew will realize that we need a serious green fuel strategy? Like creating the Interstate System, and favored entitlement programs, a progressive energy policy is something that Government must get rolling, because sometimes markets do not factor in the long term benefits of national security, and doing nothing is putting the clamps to us. Markets are sometimes neither rational or farsighted. Even Milton Friedman knows this. I repeat, there are times, albeit rare, where government is the best change agent.

How long, for the love of Job, must I foul this space with political diatribes? I don't want to care about energy policy. I don't want to care about government in general. But these conch bastard-Texan-transplants force my hand. When it costs me 20 bucks to put a half tank of fuel into my ride...knowing that the proceeds are being split between Bush-centric oil companies and despotic regimes, well shucks, it really pisses me off...especially when I know that absolutely nothing of consequence is being done to ameliorate the damage. There is no serious drive towards creating marketable hydrogen vehicles and there is sure as hell no chance that we will suddenly be awash in enough extra oil to slash prices at the pump.

Even if there is a ton of extra capacity is drilled out and refined above and beyond current production, demand is guaranteed to arc upward for the foreseeable future-- thanks in large part to the modernization of China and India. As we've learned in basic economics, and especially in the diamond trade, when demand is perceived to be very high, a cartel can practically set its price even if supply is deep. The nature of greed being what it is, how do you think that's going to work out with regards to oil. In a culture that places getting over without getting caught above all else, do you really think in this environment that oil will sniff 30 bucks a barrel again before is sees $80?

I've written a well-reasoned essay on why we need to change our energy policy, pronto. Thomas Friedman and other respected pundits speak often on the same subject, but there is no real outcry from the people, our people. And when I think about that, when I think about what our energy policies have looked like from the California electricity crisis onward, and when I think about the general public's general indifference to it, it leaves me a little cold...nay it makes me feel like Conrad, writing about the hopeless savages knicking up an enlightened space. As much as I'd love to see an upfront and total commitment to wean us away from fossil fuels, most of America doesn't give a rat's ass. Bush is an oilman president. Everyone knows this, yet he remains in power.

Do these three things at once, immediately: Start construction on near-interstate hydrogen filling stations while offering a fat fat reward for the first company that can produce an economically viable fuel cell car, and wrap this all in an information blitz to the public. Explain what the development of China and India, among other countries, means to our way of life in a world and economic model based on the scarcity of valuable resources. Explain how the current Cartel-based system (both the Arab cartel and the Texan cartel) sets artificial prices and is thus an affront to the notion of fair markets. With regards to oil, the markets are not even close to free. Bush and his ho's will never tell you this...not that I think for a second that Bush is capable of thinking deeply about energy policy, so suffice to say his handlers will never tell him this. Furthermore, explain to the public why this is vital for our national security. Like establishing mirco-grids, decentralizing fuel production on all levels is a great counterweight to terrorist threats on oil pipelines and the like. Oh, and hydrogen is clean, let's not forget that.

Know what this is about for the current Administration? It's about keeping the money exactly where it is, nothing more, nothing else. Does this American public really understand that? Do they really think Bush represents the Goldwater ideal of liberty and free markets? No, and it doesn't matter anyway. He's a C-student ex-sinner made good and that's enough for our electorate.

Every time I think or write about politics someone or something ought to smack me or zap me a few times with a taser, something. American politics is like porno, but with twice the shadiness and almost none of the gratification. All the other similarities seem to fit: the joyless repetition, the people-as-property mindset, the kingmaker's calling shots from strangely lit rooms in large buildings... Politicians make Lawyers look noble.

I'm leery about placing relatively new albums on this list. Fantastic Damage dropped in 2k2, but this is a safe call. Take early Squarepusher, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Miles' Bitches Brew, throw it all in a petri dish and wait to see what happens...70 minutes of Fantastic Damage is what happened. This is probably the most sonically heavy album ever committed to disc. El Producto, once one-third of the groundbreaking Company Flow crew, was thinking heavily about the recent 9-11 craziness in his hometown. He was dealing with ex-label that was trying to extract extra cash (Rawkus). He was also dealing with the day-to-day stress of running a growing record label he had built from the ground-up (Def Jux).

Now that I think about it, the fact that this thing is #82 on my list tells me just how much amazing music is out there...or maybe it's in. This will probably climb the music Valhalla scale as time passes.

I've never liked things being listed as underground, though I understand why stuff must be considered beyond the scope of mass acceptance. Fantastic Damage is inaccessible to ~90 percent of our domestic population. The beats are heavy and abrasive, albeit funky as hell, and the lyrics explore every dark crevice of America, and capitalism in general, in between love songs and clowning sci-fi orgies. El-P's work usually has a political tint to it, and he makes Howard Dean look like Pat Buchanan. Extreme Leftism is built upon emotional truths, which often don't work well in the real world. Like many gifted artists before and since, El-P rages against big-money special interests and other catch-phrases of leftist paranoia, even going as far to imply that Bush is building an Orwellian society over a dope glitch-heavy dry beat (Accidents Don't Happen):

Yo, I touch with rusted clutch, then spun out of the dust and careen into the temples of automated destruct
nanotech bugs in the blood get unplugged
fishing for the fly shit hybrid
I run among the mudskipper swarms through warnings and good morning Beiruits
Little Billy Blunderbuss looking for more recruits
city life is practice of casket truancy
that's the rule of you and me,
brash unmasked lunacy friends used to laugh fast, grasped little truth from me

Later, El-P tag partner on the song, Cage, spews a little somethin' somethin' too:

It's like the Bilderburgs came to dinner with filthy birds
they pussy all infected I'm lookin for milky words
they pulled my third eye out then they let it dry out
had to pour my belief in Christ to find out
what I look like with no skin who mandated while the back of my paper is still luminated even your no flipped egyptian Euro
got my website shut down by the Bureau
Can't kick it with the dead until my life stop
but Bush got a ouija to talk to Adam Weishaupt

Dense, eh? The entire album is like that, lyrically and sonically. El-P raps in a clipped condensed style that packs more verbiage per bar than just about anyone out there, and thus you need to hear his songs many times over, or find his lyrics online to know what he's saying and even then there is no guarantee you'll know exactly what he is talking about. Fully appreciating El-P has always required an active imagination and a love of all things heavy. That said, Fantastic Damage also has it's moments of personal intimacy and spare beauty (T.O.J., the coda for Truancy, and the wondrous instrumentalInnocent Leader). A few words about Truancy.

Starting off with a speedfreak rolling beat and awesome deep drum fills, El-P takes us through his path from schoolhouse troublemaker, to truant, to being an MC and a producer. The jist of the song is about finding something you can believe in and putting your heart 100% into it, no matter what society in general thinks. Good advice. El-P's narrative takes us through NYC subway battle sessions, 9-11, and finally leaves the listener with this:

For cats who come for fame with my name of their lips
Rethink it, sucking fake milk from poison tits
This for kids worried 'bout the apocalypse
Do something. Prepare yourself and stop talking shit

Then the main part of the song winds down, with layer after layer stripped away until the sounds of a rhythmic record scratch-loop spins alone, then that loop slows, stops, and opens into beautiful coda consisting of the same record scratch in a different time signature, an organ sample, and another keyboard sample washed through some Pro Tools effects...and it comes out natural, organic and gorgeous.

Fantastic Damage even gives it up for ex-girlfriends! Where else in hip hop will you find that? Fiddy-Cent ain't gonna be writing tunes to the ho who broke his heart in 8th grade. Anyway. On the stunning T.O.J. (Time Out of Joint) El-P spins a Vonnegut / Billy Pilgrim notion into an ode to an ex-girlfriend who apparently did more good things then bad. The beats are at once like an organ ballad with slow funky drum layers that could've come from an old Mandrill album and, again, Squarepusher-esque glitchy. The lyrics go:

No fantasy of reconciliation or delusion of no revenge (No bullshit)
no culture hidden agendas, no preaching (No pedestal) no standing on the pulpit,
no ego, no new speaker freakish lingo (Here I go...)
I haven't loved many people I grew up afraid that I was crazy
And one time when I was deep inside your body you purred
And I was sure that you were gonna have my baby

El-P goes on to speculate that he had to fall apart to become a man instead of a boy, and that getting dumped by the muse of T.O.J. made that happen. Quite a contrast from the Orwellian nightmare parts of the album, but that's the beauty of this thing.

On tracks like Tuned Mass Damper and Dr. Hellno vs. The Praying Mantus the album gets downright riotous, as in funny. On Tuned Mass Damper, a diss track of the first order, El-P takes aim at San Francisco's Anticon Crew, over one of the thickest funkiest bests ever recorded, and wails You motherfuckers don't have grit, you're all teenage poetry, martyrs without causes . Thwap! On Dr. Hellno, with a sci-fi b-movie vibe to the core, El-P and Vast Aire of Cannibal Ox take turns spitting rhymes about sci-fi misogyny that maybe predicts what gangster rap will sound like in 2050. At one point, while talking about seducing his insect-mutant girlfriend El-P shouts Chick screamed so loud I could hear her on my last album. The whole song is like that...with the boys getting their heads bitten off if they don't satisfy properly.

The best art contains paradox. Fantastic Damage is mechanical yet organic, harsh yet tender, angry yet forgiving, serious and hilarious. I've listened to this album a couple-hundred times and something new and cool reveals itself after every listen. Fantastic Damage will be relevant 200 years from now. Politics aside, it works.

Not long after I dropped down in Flint-town, I realized that I'd have to polish my cooking chops since there's a paucity of decent restaurants around here. As I've mentioned before, Red Lobster is haute cuisine here. When I was a kid, I thought the absence of great eats was due to Flint's relatively small size compared to Detroit and Chicago...at the time my main points of reference, or lack of a major university like Ann Arbor. Then I left high school, saw the world, and quickly realized why Flint was Flint. It was the people. It's always the people. You get what you want: fast food, Applebees, coney island joints, and a family restaurant for every dollar store.

Luckily, there are several grocery stores around here with awesome selections of produce and meats. So there is a contingent out there who likes to cook good stuff but not sit at a place with nice tablecloth and a resident somalie. I wonder why nice grocery stores don't translate into some nice restaurants? My quest for answers begins at our our Wal-Mart stores, which do a booming business here.

There are, roughly, three types of folks who visit our local Wal-Mart institutions: Those who brave the crowds a few times a year for big purchases at rock-bottom prices. Those who go every weekend, to find everything in one place, for the cheapest stuff irregardless of quality or sweatshop of product origin. And finally, the freaks...the extras and stand-ins from any Cops episode. The difference between them can be subtle to the uninitiated. But think of it this way: There is a certain kind of person who appears on Judge Judy, and certain kind of person who appears on Jerry Springer (this constitutes your average Wal-Mart shopper in Flint). The rest of our local Wal-Mart shoppers belong on Cops. You get the sense that the thing these folks hate most about winter is that it forces them to wear something more than flip-flops and a halter top--stretched to death by a beer and pizza gut. They beat their kids in public and curse out at least one store employee per visit. It's omnipresent in the land of the cheap...which is almost like the land of the free but, well, no I won't go there.

I need to find a way to stick a hidden camera on or near the near Wal-Mart customer service desk. No host, no soundtrack, just an unedited stream of our locals in their most natural environment: bitching about cheap crap that broke too soon. No I don' wanna damn coupon you f**k..I wanna cash refund. Cash money! Flint's Wal-Mart outposts are hives of despair, moreso for me than the customers themselves, I suspect. Humans are good at escaping reality. Speaking of: Is that why are we so girded towards consumption? Nice stuff is great, sure, but isn't it more important to glean knowledge and marketable skills, more important to stay fit and feel good about your body, than say, shoveling down a half-dozen 99-cent hotdogs with a big bag of cheap towels, undergarments, and Jeff Foxworthy videos in tow? WTF man?

Actually, there should be two or three hidden cameras. I got it. In addition to the customer service cam, post one in the middle of the Wal-Mart parking lot, and one by the entrance. Nothing kills my seratonin levels and jacks up my sympathy like a mix of Store Greeters, Screaming Brats, and Mulleted Adults who are an hour past and an hour before their next application of corporal punishment. That lil' Skezzer's gonna kill me if I don' kill him first. What a goddamned hell-child. How'd he get like that? Attention Wal-Mart shoppers, your children are like that because mommy and daddy are like that. When freaks and addicts with no course or purpose in life get together in a hellspot like Flinttown to reproduce...you get hellspawn. Wha??? You thought Flint's public schools were going to smooth out the behavior issues...or maybe, in thinking that the kids seemed decent enough when you were wasted, you put too much stock in a false reality? Best not think about it...there's frozen pizza on sale. They should just stick slot machines inside Wal-Mart and be done with it. Eat, Drink, Shop, and get Lucky at Wal-Mart. Our Gold-Club gamblers get 10-cents off their second order of wing-dings. You could build housing on Wal-Mart lots too. It's be like Liberty City after the Muriel Boat Lift.

Target, by way of comparison, is Flint's answer to trendy box-store shopping. I'm not dissing Target, I like their housewares section. Hell, I even have some winter gear from that place. Your typical Target shopper also builds things. The females are master craft-types and den mothers, and the men tend to have about 50k worth of tools in their garage, and the large mechanical things they aim to fix never end up on the front lawn like some hellish post-industrial nativity display. Flint's Target stores are packed with rednecks for sure, but the kind of redneck I like ...reactionary on small issues, chill on the big issues, and very competent.

Wal-Mart and Target take in a high percentage of Flint's consumer dollar. We have one Marshall Fields to service 500,000 people. For the unknowing, Marshall Fields is similar to Macy's, maybe Nordstroms, definitely not as frou-frou as Needless Markup. What I take from that is one's retail choices will reflect one's restaurant choices. Since there is no demand for culturally rich shopping in Flint, similarly there is no need for a couple excellent fusion restaurants. We have one sushi joint, a couple of middle eastern spots, and more chinese restaurants than you could shake a stick at, but they are all, well, bargain places with good food but nothing memorable. Again, this services an area of half a million people. Downtown Flint's anchor restaurant right now is a burger joint.

You learn a lot about somebody based on their consumption habits. Take two people who make ~50k a year...a good income in Flint. One person has a metric ton of crap to his name-- two average cars, a beat house, cupboards packed with boxed dried pasta dishes and canned beans, and closets and drawers filled with garish cheap clothes and knickknacks, three cheap TV's, two boom boxes, zero books...a veritable sea of garbage. Let's say the other 50k earner has exactly one-third to one-half the volume of the goods, but it's cool stuff-- one nice TV, a nice collection of books, a nice car, a nice small and well-maintained house, I could go on. Large parts of society are hooked on things that don't even give you a nice buzz. That's a damn shame. Consumption for the sake of consumption pushes a lot of cool things beyond the horizon of comprehension, not to mention interaction, of the addict consumer. It's an illness, and it's everywhere around here, though I have not figured out yet what to call it.

The joys of digital cartooning have consumed me, seriously. My mind is mush, which I'm told has given me a pleasant vacant stare that has made me more approachable in recent weeks. Nice. One of my New Year's resolutions was to inject at least 3 doses of semi-extemporanous prattle per week into this space. Would be easier from a creation standpoint if I was hopped up on crystal and E, but I like my gumlines and brainwaves as they are, thanks, so I'll do it the old fashioned way. Has anyone developed a meth habit and come out better because of it? I'm not talking dabbling, though meth looks like something that most people commit to right away. I'm talking the full-on experience, where at the end, the user is either looking at death, prison, or the sweet sting of salvation. Hey, to a post-modernist it's all different kinks of the same hallucination, right?

I'm piecing together the main segments of the first episode of a cartoon series that I've plotted out meticulously but as of this typing remains naked without a proper title. Should I just call the damn thing Untitled? Can I do that and take a credible stand on anything, ever again? Face it, if you're an artist, or even a marketing hack, and you call something Untitled, then you'll likely never be taken seriously again...side from them confused kids who smell like patchouli and work in the vegan food co-op. Alas, their lot is already cast in stone. I'll give a pass to Interpol, because the first track on their debut album is called Untitled, and it's an awesome song. Hey, what's the use of writing if I can't go from righteousness to benign hypocrisy in the same paragraph? For some current real-world examples of the aforementioned, check out what folks are saying about George Jr. The Born Again Wonderboy vis a vis this whole Arab democracy movement.

The New York Times, Jon Stewart, and even Ward Churchill have come out and said that Bush may have got the thing right after all. Hell, Churchill even got a crew-cut and volunteered to help re-wire the new WTC complex...just to pitch in as a Good American. Oh, but seriously, isn't oscillation grand? Only in today's soundbite world can one go from moronic stooge to new Texan Messiah in the span of a Levitra commercial. The well-anchored among us know better.

Did I miss something, or was spreading democracy NOT a part of the national debate during the runup to the Iraq War, part Deux? We definitely talk about it now, especially the administration, which has collectively learned that because the voting public has no functioning collective long term memory, that changing White House tunes couldn't be easier if it was done with iPod. Bush swears by that thing when he's working out.

Can the Middle East really turn to democracy when oil is cruising along at $55 a barrel, and with speculators figuring it'll hit $80 within the next year or two? Are the regions' despots really ready to relinquish power, or will they simply reform, in baby steps, until the United States is distracted by something else? I don't really know, and neither does anyone else. Jim Hoagland, writing today in the Washington Post about the Middle East (where he used to live), made some astute observations:

Exaggerated optimism about Iraq -- mine included -- gave rise to post-invasion bitterness and exaggerated pessimism inside and outside the administration. The overreaction -- the swift, continuing alternation in perception between "success" and "failure" -- obscured the need for a speedy transfer of responsibility to Iraqis and helped delay elections there. The political runways in Iraq were overshot, successively, in opposite directions.

Something similar could easily happen in Lebanon, a country that provides a study in contrasts, physical and political, as I kept hearing when I was preparing to move there for The Post in 1972: You can ski down snowy slopes in the morning to swim in the Mediterranean at lunch. Lebanon contains the Arab world's most energetic, resourceful and warm people -- until their divisions and hatreds explode into internecine butchery.

Oddly and tragically, there is no war like war amongst neighbors. The absolute viciousness of Civil Wars generally bear this out. Obviously, I hope and pray that Iraq and Lebanon transform themselves into healthy democracies, and I hope they are catalysts for the transformation of the greater Middle East. I hope that Israel will one day be liked and secure in the embrace of their neighbors, and I hope that some day soon oil is no longer an issue in any of this. Oil has done more to cripple Arab culture than tribalism and colonialism put together, but what you gonna do? We've already thrown our hat into the consume-at-will ring, and our public seems at peace with it. The Bush Administration certainly seems at peace with it.

One way or another, Bush will pack more history books than Clinton. 9-11 alone saw to that. I just wish they'd keep their stories straight. Otherwise, common sense says that I must question their motives.

The Pistons are demonstrating just how quickly the wheels can come off a nice machine. After winning the first three games of a West Coast road trip, Detroit chucked a 12pt 4th quarter lead against the Suns and similarly wilted late against Seattle and Sacto. The Pistons aren't supposed to be wilting late, nor are they supposed to be losing three in a row ...especially when the losing comes from jacking up too many threes and playing no perimeter defense. Rip and Chauncey were acting like they'd have to run a freaking triathlon just to cover the arc. Fine. You give people like Steve Nash and Ray Allen uncontested shots and you're gonna get spanked. No way around it. It sucks for the obvious reasons related to losing, but it also sucks because the reserves and big guys are playing great. Rasheed's playing his best ball as a Piston. I did not see the recent mini-fold coming, but that's part of the joy of being a Detroit sports fan. Like Larry Brown insinuates, these are young men, for the most part, and when they get on a roll, it's east to sit back and think your poo doesn't stink and that marginal effort can beat an inspired opponent. It almost never works that way, but given enough leeway, we always forget that.

James Lileks pooled and spewed some interesting info about the Liberal wing's take on Social Security. Check it out. Briefly, James posits that the Left does not think there is really a looming crisis in SS because there is no overall demographic shift. The ratio deficit in worker to retiree is made up via low birthrates, thus the lower societal cost of raising children...given us more cash as a society to lavish on old people. That's obviously insane. There is no moral equivalence between raising children and caring for retirees, and I highly doubt that more than ~5% of the left supports such thinking. That Lileks would harp on such a thing tells me how far down the partisan road he's traveled. It's not much different than Maureen Dowd writing that Republicans wish to send gays straight to hell because a dingbat like Rick Santorum advocates such a thing. There are many flavors of kool-aid out there, and some stick with you.

There is a genuine demographic crunch regarding SS and it looks like it's going to get worse before anything constructive is done about it. That's fine. There's a ton of Gen Xers watching how Washington and the nation conduct their business these days and when we have our hands on the sugar teats of governments...ah sweet payback. I must add, for the record, how glad I am that while Boomers have hopelessly screwed our government finances and buried the bar at new depths for demonstrations of pettiness, they are willing lab rats for all the cool life and penis-extending drugs that'll benefit today's 20 and 30-somethings without the crippling side effects. Cheers, folks. I really appreciate the sacrifice.

Metallica produced three of the 20 greatest metal albums ever. Some would say four of the best 20, but Kill Em All just misses in my book. There are enough primary-color thrash fests out there that do what Kill Em All does, sometimes better. But Metallica's next three albums were so mindbendingly good that whole sub-genres of music sprang up to sing their praises. Ride The Lightning was released on my birthday in 1984. I was a teenager, a metalhead, and completely blown away. Up until I discovered Metallica, my metal jones was fixed by the likes of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, good bands for sure, but as the early 80s moved into the mid 80s, power ballads sprang up like poisonous mushrooms after a shitrain. The need for new blood in metal was obvious.

I was in Biology class as the period was about to start when Tim Hall came into class with his bulky Sony Walkman, thrashing his head about like a crazed tiger shark.

Put on the headphones, hit play, mellow fingerpicking. Mellow!? K. Hammett's playing this little ditty that sounds like a rip-off from Dio's Last In Line opening or prog-era Genesis. I'm about to throw the tape player back at Tim and scream the sellout curse but then the crunch and the stomp washes over the song like a beserk tsumani and Fight Fire With Fire gains it's form. The song is about nuclear war. The pretty opening guitar ditty was the goodness of mankind, the glass half full, the birds chirping on a crisp sunny morning...then it all goes straight to hell. Kinda like Flint. Kinda like being a teenager.

Where to start? It was more precise than Maiden, angrier than Motorhead, and punk as f**k. I got most of the way through the opening track when Mr. Simms came ambling in and announced that class would begin immediately and please, sir, get those blasted headphones off your hat-rack.

Tim was nice enough to burn me a tape from his album since the local record store's didn't have copies. Until fall of that year, if you wanted to buy Metallica, you'd need their mail-order catalog, or you'd have to venture to Ann Arbor or Detroit. Thus, for almost three months, all I had to soak in this amazing album was a burned tape of suspect quality. Tim's family wasn't rolling in the cashish, none of our families were, so the recording equipment was usually a $49 tape player with a feed from a Fischer all-purpose receiver. The turntables in my neck of the woods were invariably lightweight belt-drive things that doubled as frisbees once they were worn out...all functional equipment, sure, but listening to Ride The Lightning now, remastered from a thick VBR file, and screaming out from my Harmon Kardon system, well, it's hard not to feel that I was cheated then, just a little.

I listened to that tape all the time. Metallica's topics on Ride The Lightning were invariably dark and deep. No preening about looking for a good time, but ruminations on the death penalty (Ride The Lightning), war (For Whom The Bell Tolls), and the timeless suicide track (Fade To Black). The album screams teenage male. It also helped that Metallica was maybe the best live band on the planet then and even years after their studio output fell off. Ride The Lightning also had a little egghead fare: Creeping Death, which is just filthy sick in a room with 20k screaming heads, talks on one level about the biblical harvesting of the first-borns in Egypt land...but on another level, it is a modern holocaust song. Lyrics aside, it's probably the chunkiest and heaviest song on the album.

The band even venture towards metal-prog at end of Ride The Lightning with The Call Of Ktulu. Written by Dave Mustaine before he was booted from the band, the guitar and bass parts really shine. Like all early Metallica, it's heard not to hear songs like this and feel real sorry and angry that Cliff Burton had to get crushed under a tour bus. I'm also left wondering what exactly Mustaine did that was so bad to warrant getting booted from the band. I mean, Hetfield and Lars were known as constant drinkers. As Hetfield once said in an interview, they were known by friends and roadies as Alcohollica. In the end I supposed it worked out. We got more great work from Metallica, plus a lot of excellent Megadeth material...but what if they had all stayed on the same side? Would that terrible 90s studio output have never happened? Perhaps they wouldn't have been such dicks about file sharing? I mean, I discovered these guys through tape sharing...and when all was said and done, Metallica made some good coin off me. Anyway.

20 years on, I've outgrown a lot of the subject matter on Ride The Lightning, but the music is still the soundtrack to many of my best workouts.

There's a foot of snow in my front yard, and for that matter, across most of Michigan. I'm often left wondering why everyone hasn't moved away to someplace warmer, someplace nicer. Sure, four seasons are nice if you're a masochist and believe that hardship builds character, but this seems so unnecessary. After the manufacturing economy went tits-up in the 80s, what was stopping folks from moving to south or west? I have my theories and they are built atop foundations of fear and or loyalty to place. I'm not impartial. I hate cold weather. Hate it. Seven years in California has turned me into a reeking weather-puss...sorry. It's a tough thing for me to admit, but damn, the snow, sleet, sub-zero weather and asshead drivers are all components of my life that that I wish to shed. That said, I'm optimistic.

Spring training for the Detroit 9 is underway in Lakeland, Fl. When you're living in a cold climate, Spring Training means something. It means that crap weather is on the wane, even if it's not showing. It's light out till almost seven and I'm warmed with the knowledge that the Tigers will be good this year. That's no typo, nor am I high...the Detroit Tigers will win ~90 games this year. Write it down, email me if you wanna make some bets. The Tigers probably won't see the playoffs, let alone the pennant, but they'll be close, and they'll serve notice that their athletic incompetence of historic proportions rests in a bitter past. Damn straight. My sunny predictions rest on a few assumptions:

Our young rotation will make nice strides this year.
Magglio Ordonez will be healthy and productive.
Carlos Guillen will again play at an All Star level.
Detroit's defense won't stink.
Half the team doesn't get busted for slathering up in the cream and the clear.

Wilfredo Ledezma. Jeremy Bonderman. Remember those names. Ledezma is a 24 year old fireballer with a sick changeup and a decent curve. His fastballs have great action around the plate. More importantly, after being called up from Triple A Toledo last summer, Ledezma turned in several eye-opening outings. I saw him pitch against the White Sox last year and came away impressed with his poise, workspeed, and those slicing fastballs.

Bonderman has franchise written all over him. He throws darts, has great command, and he's only 22. He tried to be a bit too pretty with his heater and changeup last year and cost him in walks, and of course runs. If you got the habit to walk people, chances are your ERA's gonna take hits. Into the last half of the 2004 season, Bonderman made a point to get ahead early in counts, and his ERA went down quick. He's always been hard to hit so if he's done walking five players a game, Bonderman's a perennial 20 win guy.

Magglio Ordonez has Hall of Fame talent, health willing. Being a 30-something professional athlete with a whack knee is often a kiss of death. I think of Ellis Burks and cringe. It seems that once a knee goes gimpy, it's never 100% percent again. The aging demons focus on the weaknesses of the body, no matter how healthy you are. Got a touch of tennis elbow at 30? Bet your ass that it's gonna be worse at 35 unless you're buying replacement parts or mainlining stem cells. On the plus, sports medicine is at a place now days that chronic and degenerative ailments are manageable, often, for a half-dozen years or more. Detroit gave Ordonez a thorough physical before signing him, and seemed confident that he can manage his gimp parts enough to slide him a fat contract. I'm going to assume, and it's a big assumption, that the Tigers know what they are doing here. They have been known to make a crackhead move or two in the past.

Hard to believe that the Tigers actually tried to sign Rich Aurilia over Guillen to fill a need at short. That's just crazy, but these are the Tigers. Luckily, fate headed off Detroit's quest for stupidity and Aurilia signed with Seattle- who suddenly needed to unload their previous shortshop, Guillen. Detroit reluctantly signed him and all Carlos did was hit .318 with 20 jacks, 97 RBIs, and day after day play stellar defense. Rich Aurilia? I saw that cat play in Frisco for many moons. One word: Tool. In 2004 he batted .246 with six longs. Carlos Guillen has had some knee issues, and an offseason procedure to make it right. As I've mentioned above, it's of the manageable variety. He's moving around nice in Florida and he's totally stoked to repeat his 2k4 campaign.

Detroit's D last year was a cruel joke. There's nothing to watch than an outfield that can't catch or throw get clowned daily in a cavernous space like Comerica. Bobby Higginson played the best of the bunch and he was mediocre. Special ugly awards went to Alex Sanchez, who is one of the fastest players in the bigs but fields like a wino wearing oversized boxing gloves. I've never seen worse ball judgment from a major league outfielder. It sometimes took two or three full seconds from the crack of the bat on for Sanchez to figure out where the ball was going. That's no good. Reports from Florida say that he has worked on his game. Having Ordonez in right will help..but we'll see. Alan Trammell is a fundamentalist, so I'm thinking he's found a way to improve the overall D unless he's seeking an ulcer. You never know, Detroit folks sometimes like a little punishment with their coffee.

Speaking of baseball, I've learned something about the differences between the mundane and supernatural when it comes to animation. I've discovered that making someone realistically swing a ballbat in 2D anime is much tougher than, say, making someone fly through a skyscraper without damaging anything. In the world you and I live in, the opposite is true. I've been able to swing a ballbat with at least decent aptitude since I was ~4. I've never flown through a building and I expect that should I ever try, it would be the last thing I do. The problem with animating someone swinging a ballbat has to do with perspective and angles. The ballbat, as it goes through the swing, must exist in many different forms from the point it leaves the character's shoulder till the end of the swing. Now I know why superhero cartoons were so popular back in the day. It's easier to depict the physically impossible. It'd take me about 10 minutes to make a figure climb up the side of a building hand over hand...takes 100x as long to show the same character make a right turn on an empty road. Anyway, my cartoons require some swings of the bat, and they require some driving shenanigans.

And, rooting for the Tigers requires a thick skin and willing amnesia. But this year it'll be different. Oh yes.

I've never been much of a political partisan. True believers scare the hell out of me, and represent, by and large, motives unspoken and apart from their stated agenda. Our society is filled with such people and they are all about identification to groupthink. At the fringes of political true believers reside the resident fools and unrepentant ass-clowns of their respective movements...folks like Ward Churchill and Ann Coulter.

Ward Churchill is a slab of shit for calling victims of the 9-11 disaster 'little Eichmanns'. But that alone is hardly any worse than Ann Coulter saying we needed to convert the whole of Islam to Christianity by the point of a hot sword. Both views are beneath contempt, but protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution. So they can make asses of themselves all they want. Thankfully, Ann does not teach her venom in a public institution. Ward Churchill does. I'll do him first.

The University of Colorado was duped by a con man. It happens. People are busy and good background checks are expensive and time-consuming. Long-tardy scrutiny is finally making Ward Churchill's house of cards fall around him. He's been exposed in art fraud. The validity of his Cherokee heritage has been cast into doubt. He claims to have been a Green Beret in Vietnam when in fact he was a truck driver in the Rear.

Ward Churchill, like most demagogues, and poseur demagogues, is a liar and a thief. He lives with a victim's mentality ...probably reflective of some childhood slight he never purged from his system. His mindset supports the belief that the oppressed may do anything against the wicked system because it is only justice. Ward Churchill of course knows who the wicked are, he's got the notes, and the angles.

Chances are that you haven't, until the recent controversy, heard or read anything by Ward Churchill. He's not too bright, and his diatribes are damn near unreadable. Churchill's justifications for calling the WTC victims 'little Eichmann's':

Eichmann was a mere mid-level officer in the SS, by all accounts a good husband and devoted father, apparently quite mild-mannered, and never accused of having personally murdered anyone at all. His crime was to have sat at several steps remove from the holocaustal blood and gore, behind a desk, in the sterility of an office building, organizing the logistics – train and “cargo” schedules, mainly – without which the “industrial killing” aspect of the nazi Judeocide could not have occurred. His most striking characteristic, if it may be called that, was his sheer “unexceptionality” (that is, the extent to which he had to be seen as “everyman”: an ordinary,” “average” or “normal” member of his society. (“The Ghosts of 9-1-1,” note 131)

For the above to be analogous to the workers inside the World Trade Center, we would need more of a smoking gun...like a dozen human charnel houses from Boston to LA, with minorities and undesirables and enemies of the State riding the rails to their doom. Obviously, Professor Churchill knows not a whit what makes an analogy. Fargin douchebag. Ward Churchill is extremely angry at the world, and every university in America has morons like Churchill. At Maryland, I had a sensitive English professor who refused to cover Hemingway in 20th Century Lit because Papa was thought to be a chauvinist. Never mind that he redefined prose stylings for the 20th century and wrote better short stories than Joyce. The Right is pissed because they want public universities to have more morons like Ann Coulter and thus fewer morons like Ward Churchill.

Folks are so up in arms about the crap Churchill spews that it seems too many have forgotten the poison that shoots forth from Ann Coulter's mind like farts from a dragon. From SpinSanity.com

Coulter's world is cartoonish. Liberals are "terrorists" and a "cult" who "can never just make a principled argument" . Their arguments are portrayed as hysterical, screaming or starting political World War III. Meanwhile, as Coulter depicts it, conservatives are being persecuted ceaselessly. For example, when The New York Times urged Bush to "crack down" on anti-abortion activists who threaten doctors, she wrote this: "[i]n their darkest fantasies, this is what liberals claim McCarthyism was."

Serious reviews of her written work is difficult. Coulter has neither the intelligence or the desire to speak the truth. But damn, she IS entertaining. A former Deadhead liberal, something about the left jarred her into a fury much the way the left did to Reagan, and rather than looking at the whole of a political theory and separating the good ideas from the bad ones, and Liberalism still has some good ideas, Coulter, like Reagan before her, forswore the whole thing. She was spurned, she got angry. Thus Coulter portrays liberals and the left as engaged in a grand conspiracy to destroy the United States:

While undermining victory in the Cold War, liberals dedicated themselves to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home... Betraying the manifest national defense objectives of the country is only part of the left's treasonous scheme. They aim to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and the truth. (pg289 from Treason)

Ann Coulter uses her vapid sex appeal to sell books and suck in dollars. Few creatures are as sexually repressed as the white conservative male. Compare the Clinton White House to the Bush White House. Prolly hasn't been too many money shots flying across the Lincoln bedroom since Dubbya came aboard. Coulter, by acting like a righteous Nordic ex-bimbo in a catsuit with a book contract to boot, capitalizes on this missionary-with-the-lights-out-only mentality. It's a mentality that almost always hides some twisted urges. Rush Limbaugh prolly can't get within 20 feet of Coulter without messin' in his pants...shamefully gimping off towards the nearest bathroom to finish and clean himself up. Part of me wants to applaud Ann for finding such a great hustle and exploiting it as she does...but she's such an asshole that I'm forced to dislike her, strongly.

I can think of only one solution to the sickness Ward Churchill and Ann Coulter try to spread to across our great land: Dose both Churchill and Coulter with a half-vial of strong acid and tie them together in a dark closet. Leave them be for a week. Nothing more will be necessary.

- k

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Spring: Bout Damn Time