ANNE DE JONG IS ASKING US TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF GAZA

Anthropologist Anne De Jong

ISRAEL OPENS FIRE ON PEACE FLOTILLA, IN NIGHT ASSAULT AT SEA

Attacking in international waters, under cover of darkness, Israeli commandos boarded and seized the six ships of the Peace Flotilla, that were bound for Gaza. It is being called a massacre on the high seas, as Israel's men came aboard shooting and firing teargas. Ten people are reported dead; but judging by the first reports, the count may go higher, with dozens injured.

Go read Stephen Lendman's Slaughter at Sea:

Video footage on board the Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara showed Israeli commandos opened fire during the assault, activists saying it began immediately after storming on board.

Al Zazeera's Jamal Elshayyal, on the ship, said "a white surrender flag was raised (and) there was no live fire coming from the passengers."

The Free Gaza Movement reported that "Under darkness of night, Israeli commandos dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck." No action on board provoked it. It was premeditated, willful slaughter.

This is a barbarous attack. It is also diplomatically self-defeating for Israel, to an extent that's almost beyond calculation. This is going to set off a firestorm of protest all over the world, and is occurring at the same time that Israel's submarines, armed with nukes, are near the shores of Iran.

Israel and Turkey used to be allies; but their souring relationship is likely to come to a stark end, as Turkish citizens were killed in this fiasco at sea. It's also been reported, in the Guardian, that the Greek captain of one of the small ships was shot; and officials in Athens are reported to be angry.

Over a year ago our country was in a transition period; and while Barack Obama celebrated being President-Elect, Israel was invading Gaza in what was certainly a massacre, killing way over 1,400 people. Israel used up, consumed in fact, all of the moral reputation it had left. And in the United States especially, a cone of silence was carefully adjusted over international new reports which, from time to time, detailed the story of torture of non-Jews in Israeli custody.

There is a kind of emotional deadening that surrounds Americans, like a protective layer, when it comes to the crimes of Israel's right-wing government.

Yet the paranoid pathology has become a part of Israel now. Its policy is against its own interests. And the policy of the US follows Israel, wherever Israel goes diplomatically, and will defend Israel (apparently to the death) no matter what Israel does.

Well you don't need a Book of Revelation, or a dowsing rod, or the Farmer's Almanac, to see where that leads. Plant by the full moon and dig deeply into the Earth.

Returning to this latest horror, the Palestinians in Gaza are still living in the rubble, and no relief so far is coming to relieve them. The right-wing Israeli government used its military to turn this place into a desperate ghetto, one that hangs onto life with the trickle of humanitarian goods that Israel allows in by road.

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

--St. Matthew, Chapter 10, verses 28-29

When British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew sky high, and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, we all became implicated in a disaster that continues to gush out oil, some 5,000 feet underwater.

We are, most of us, conscious of the augeries, that is to say, the omens and shadows that are crossing our path. We go on working even as work slips away or has less effect in sustaining us. If we are writers; we keep writing even when we are tired. If we are parents worried about our children; we send them to school, and remain worried about their future.

...we defy augery: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The
readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows
what is't to leave betimes, let be.

--Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2

The Deepgulf Gusher exceeds being a metaphor for self-destruction, or a sign of the Gilded Age, a corporate heyday of looting and plunder. Right before our eyes, our own government is presenting a hands-off attitude to it; and every four days becomes a tick-tock, tick-tock of the Doomsday Clock, as another load of pollution is disgorged into the Gulf, a size that matches the Exxon Valdez dump every four days.

And BP is thinking of injecting golf balls and other debris into the rupture to jam it up. What a joke. The company's liability is being capped; and that is the chief priority of our so-called civilization. How should we expect recovery of damages once a precious ecological resource is destroyed?--once the food resource, the livelihood of fishermen is destroyed in that entire region?

We look in vain to our public institutions, our president, for accountability. Civic values have been twisted in recent years into the shape of a monstrosity. We can blame ourselves, I guess, for our sins of omission, and our failure to persuade. But there is also the intellectual laziness of this society to consider, and for what Matt Taibbi has called "...middle Americans' moronic fantasies about themselves" and their willingness to have their egos massaged by the likes of rogue politician, Sarah Palin; for these reasons, we have come to this absurd fork in the road.

The nation has been so propagandized by the well-heeled experts in that art; and over time the people themselves have become comfortable or trapped in a militarized society. It's true that millions of Americans--people we recognize every day-- have embraced "the cult of the warrior"; and they measure themselves against the cult status of the rich--those who must never on any occasion--be taxed.

The political reach of corporate power is out of control, a menace that has yet to be curbed under our present system. Big Oil and the financial sector are all that represents freedom in the halls of Congress--they are citizens of a government now. And we are out in the cruel wasteland of what was once a republic.

*************************

FROM RAW STORY: OTHER NEWS OF HUMAN FOLLY

An upcoming UN report says that providing safe zones for fish stocks to recover, and cutting back drastically on commercial fishing fleets, is the only hope to avoid a worldwide disaster.

Oceans’ fish could disappear in 40 years: UN

(Source: Agence France-Presse)

The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.

According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.

The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish -- with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.

IS THAT YOU THERE IN THE RUINS?

From Harper's Index, Harper's Magazine, May 2010:

Number of reported US drone attacks in Pakistan since Obama's inauguration: 78

Number during George W. Bush's entire presidency: 45

One criticism of President Obama and his team, that will stick, is that they allow the regressive political trends of the late past to grow worse and worse. A smattering of conservatives and libertarians, and all those hopeful liberals, leftists, progressives, who were holding their breath in anticipation of change, can now exhale. The exhilaration has escaped...and the body politic becomes torpid. As a result, the president himself expresses regret, and finds it no simple matter to undo the mistrust.

How incredible it is to consider the president's repeated use of the past tense: his claim that he "closed" the infamous Guantanamo camp, a routine phrase used in several speeches, after he moved into the White House. No such closing has happened.

The ACLU recently reprimanded Obama's administration for treating the whole world, the planet itself, as a battlefield; as Obama imitates the war powers of George W. Bush, who preceded him in office.

What is flawed goes well beyond one particular policy or another, because the real concern is the whole philosophy of American power.

In March, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. spoke to an audience of foreign affairs specialists in Arlington, Virginia:

Altogether, we spend more on military power than the rest of the world--friend or foe--combined. (This way we can defeat everyone in the world if they all gang up on us. Don't laugh! If we are sufficiently obnoxious, we might just drive them to it.) No one questions this level of spending or asks what it is for. Politicians just tell us it is short of what we require. We have embraced the cult of the warrior. The defense budget is its totem.

[...] Liberal interventionists often join the neocons in their eagerness to remake the world in our image. Hence, the war to secure Afghanistan for feminism and other undeniably worthy causes not normally associated with that country. Americans are learning the hard way that armed evangelism and the diplomacy-free foreign policy associated with it give birth to more enemies than they kill. But what's done is done. We're addicted to military surges and the substitution of campaign plans for strategies. We just can't seem to quit.

[...] Amazingly, as an example, we retain a touching faith in sanctions as an instrument of coercive influence. Our diplomacy follows a predictable pattern. It begins with bluster, experiments with covert action, then proceeds to demands that others join us in sanctions, which become a diplomatic end in themselves. When sanctions fail--as they always do, we put the bombers in the air and the tanks on the dirt...

The language that Freeman sees us reduced to, is commanded by firepower, because appeals to reason would brand us as wimps, and the folks on the receiving end of the violence are really "not like us" at all. That is sadly the guiding philosophy of American power.

And what is happening on the stage of our domestic politics sometimes seems inhuman. About 400,000 people have been deported from the country in a year's time. The ICE paramilitary, the new immigration enforcers, began in the Bush years, rounding up people by the thousands, incarcerating whole families. Now this force has been disappearing those it nabs, denying those in custody access to lawyers, warehousing prisoners in nondescript unmarked facilities, shuffling them around without providing lists or the exact location of prisoners, making these inmates invisible.

Professor Jaqueline Stevens is credited with breaking this story of the "unmarked holding areas" and stockrooms that doubled as cells.

Adios, muchachos.

No more stooping to pick our cheap veggies for shit wages. No more losing hands and fingers in our slaughterhouses. NAFTA and our monsters of patented seeds and genetically altered crops, big shits like Monsanto, Frankenstein corporations, drove a million farmers in Mexico to ruin.

But who has to pay the pound of flesh? Who has to be uprooted? Who is held without legal counsel? Who is disappeared without a paper trail? Who is rounded up in Arizona?--America's first fascist state? If it can be done to these scapegoats; it can be done to you in good time. Despite the official disclaimers of Arizona's statehouse, it's become a crime to be brown, to look Hispanic. Only those who are targets are expected to carry birth certificates in that state. People can be arrested, stopped and questioned, because they reflect a particular heritage.

Yet on some level it's remarkable that Barack Obama, the country's chief executive, our first African-American president, can be blandly criticizing Arizona's new power; but at the same time, a department of his own federal police apparatus, The ICE, is running amok.

There's a connection between the violence this government inflicts on the unfortunate people in foreign lands, who stand in its way, and the violence it inflicts on the most powerless people in its own neighborhoods.

JOHNNY SAVES THE DAY ON THE PLANET PANDORA

I saw "Avatar" a few days ago; and I guess you have to take James Cameron's anti-war film as an allegory. That's what Michael Moore has said about it: that it's "an allegory about what's happening now, set in the future".

The film is simply beautiful in its own right, also, and should be seen before it leaves the big screen.

Formula arises out of the action figure who saves the day, which we have seen a gazillion times in pop culture. Much that is of comic book appeal does not undermine the reversal of identification-- like magnetic poles switching-- in terms of who the audience identifies with in the movie. Cameron deserves credit, some credit; since species identification is otherwise a primordial reflex; and it turns out that we wonder early in the film, along with the Navian shaman, whether the insanity of human beings (the sky people) is correctable at all.

Any film maker who can turn sympathy in this way deserves credit. There's a lot in the film which shows our imperial culture being itself, and the evidence of what we have become is a stark feature of this film. There is a replication of all the ways in which technology in the West has crushed the spiritualism of every nature-centered culture it ever encountered.

The land is polluted by those who come to take from the people, using the familiar "might makes right" mandate, to steal resources from those who can be intimidated. The "sky people", who killed what remained of the green on their own world, are completely unreformed in any moral sense; and they come plundering across the reaches of interstellar space to extract minerals from Pandora, and of course are threatening to make yet another world sterile.

Quite apart from projecting the mythical world of the Navians, with all the mythologies of our ancient people superimposed upon them, the formulas of adulation for heroes included, and the triumph of the spiritual over the meanness of acquisitiveness and conquest; this film is more importantly about the grim fate that awaits a civilization that feeds on invasive violence and exploitation.

Cameron's achievement is to show what history has in store for us, the destroyers of worlds. The human race is scouring the universe for an element, a rare mineral called "Unobtainium"; the human race has left its own sterile rock, after killing the green goddess Gaia, its own mother; and matricide is not enough for it, and it can't be satisfied until the mother is killed everywhere, in every form known to sentient beings. Human beings have at last found ultimate gratification in becoming one with their killing machines, in worshiping at their own godhead, which is Mammon. Human beings are not to be satisfied until all lesser creatures kneel before them, until they have subdued and fucked all their prey.

Cameron, with some genius, has artfully identified homo sapiens here, as the alien army of occupation, an army in defeat, a disarmed bunch of mercenaries, being marched back to their transport vessels, for repatriation back to their own dead world.




This article is cross-posted at le speakeasy.

"WE HAVE COME TO LOVE OUR FEARS MORE THAN WE LOVE OUR FREEDOMS"

A society that tortures and kills those placed entirely in it's power and passes this fact by as a matter of indifference truly is plunging into the dark side of the world.

--Scott Horton

Anyone who expects better of the Obama administration should not look for any fresh glimmer of leadership or any bending of the arc of history towards justice. The results are in. This administration is closing its eyes to some of the foulest crimes to have been committed by government and military personnel during the Bush/Cheney years. The murder by torture of three prisoners at Guantanamo prison on the 9th of June, 2006, and the cover-up of that killing, is one example.

A Yemeni man, Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, and two Saudi men, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, seem to have upset their captors by staging a hunger strike over the conditions of their captivity. Yet these men posed no danger to the United States; they were young men in their twenties and thirties; and they were not advised that, in fact, the authorities were working towards releasing them.

It's important to note that when the prisoners' bodies were returned to their next of kin, their throats had been removed.

In 2006, the use of a gagging restraint had already been connected to the death on January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in the custody of the Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men who died at Guantanamo showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising. The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose. (Horton, Harper's Magazine, March 2010)

From Scott Horton's investigation in Harper's Magazine, the horrific sequence of events is reconstructed. Sometime during the evening of June 9th, Guantanamo guards observed these men being transferred after dark from Camp Delta, along a route to a clandestine camp they knew only as a landmark, and by reputation, that was dubbed "Camp No", a name that implied that one was not supposed to talk about it.

According to Horton's article, The U.S. Naval Criminal Investigation Service issued a report two years after the deaths at Guantanamo.

[...] The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS documents were carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seaton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners' deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report--a reconstruction of events--was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated.

And going back to 2006, it should be remembered that as these deaths were being announced to the world by Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of Guantanamo, that he added mockery of the dead and "affliction to their families", to the crime that had been committed in secret, which he was busy describing as suicide. And it should never be forgotten that Harris, the camp commander, lividly refused any interpretation by the press, that the three prisoners acted from desperation, taking their own lives in despair, because of their treatment in the hands of the US military, or because they resolved to give up their lives rather than face endless detention.

No, the story for public consumption was as bizarre as it was politically expedient. According to the official line, the dead men had synchronized their suicides as a potent kind political theater, and what Harris described as "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us". Coleen Graffy threw in her two cents, representing the State Department, as diplomatic Deputy Assistant Secretary: "Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move".

On the day of these deaths in 2006, the American commander in Guantanamo violated the Homeric rules of decorum by taunting the dead and afflicting their families. The deceased prisoners "have no regard for human life," he said. But in the end we must ask to whom these words more appropriately attach--the prisoners or those who have orchestrated the tragedy at Guantanamo?

(Horton, Auden--The Shield of Achilles, from Harper's Magazine)

The Obama Administration is trying to close the book on this and other investigations of torture. These Bush Administration crimes are off limits to prosecution; and if we are to judge by Horton's instinct that the Justice Department has its own secrets to hide, the continuing cover-up and obstruction of justice is still the policy, even if the joint is under new management.

Other news this week can serve as a reminder of where this country is heading: the vote in the House to approve renewal of the PATRIOT Act, unmodified. The bill was passed in the Senate by a voice vote, without debate. The offending measures, the most odious of which were hotly debated during the Bush years, are still around. The Thursday vote in the House was 315-97. The bill is now slinking to the Oval Office, where the President is expected to sign it on Sunday.

Raw Story reported that a few of our stalwarts, like Dennis Kucinich, were irate on our behalf:

The title of his press release pleaded for congress to "repeal" the Patriot Act and "restore Constitutional rights to Americans."

On this occasion, Congressman Kucinich recalled the words of Shane Harris, National Journal correspondent, on how we were witnessing the rise of an "American Surveillance State". And Kucinich added, "We have come to love our fears more than we love our freedoms".

HOPE SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES

Practically no one shouted "Long live France!" but everyone called out "Long live de Gaulle!" In moments of great distress or great joy, the crowd has a natural tendency to turn to one man and make him the symbol of their need to admire or be protected.
--Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace/Algeria 1954-1962

The culture of illusion, the Empire of Illusion, is failing to recognize the inevitable decline. It's not just that we can't pay for the lifestyles that we are maintaining internally, we can't pay for empire. [...] And if you look in the twilight period of any empire [...] people fall into this collective state of self-delusion, where they are utterly unable to see the walls literally collapsing around them. [...]

Things are so grim that there becomes this retreat into illusion. And what is illusion? It's really a state of eternal childishness. It's a kind of infantilizing of a society. But the danger is that, as that gap or chasm opens up between the illusion and reality--eventually it becomes impossible--when you're being foreclosed from your home, when your unemployment insurance runs out, when you are bankrupt because of medical bills.

It becomes impossible to ignore the reality. But if you're not prepared for it, then you react as children, which is to look for a savior or a demagogue, to save you from these inexplicable forces that you have not been prepared for, emotionally, intellectually, or psychologically. And that's the danger.
--Chris Hedges, from a lecture at The New School in New York.

They don't call it asymmetric war for nothing. On one side you have the most stupendous empire of the modern era, fit out with GPS electronics, satellite, video and laser-guided munitions, remote-controlled assassin drones, cluster bomblets that look like brightly-colored Christmas ornaments, pimped-out helicopters, tanks, fighter jets, killer mercenaries and CIA/Special Ops who answer to no one, boosted by torturers, buggerers, wiretappers, secret police and media whores.

And against this, what? A Nigerian kid who straps explosives to his nutsack.

Too many Americans avoid the crucial question,--how did this happen? And I don't mean how the kid got on an international flight to Detroit. Although that, too, is a good question. How did we, as a nation, get ourselves into an absurd military adventure that is guaranteed to bankrupt our government? Why is the president pressing ahead with a policy that will drive the country off a cliff? Every American who flies will now get a pat-down, in the region of the crotch, per the new security directive. Before long, boarding an aircraft will involve a rectal exam. I wonder if we will be able to cross the borders, then?

The Algerian War was a grave test of the survival of French democracy; their public was confronted with the reality of torture, used by French descendants in Algeria, Pieds-Noirs, who applied state sponsored violence against insurgent violence, to put down political struggle and armed movement for Algerian independence, that many in the Arab population were fighting for, or strongly supported. There was an attempted military coup, led by French generals in Algeria, to overthrow the government in France, and depose Charles de Gaulle. French people finally understood that justifying any means to put down the revolution in Algeria, abandoning any moral constraint, just to keep Algeria, was far too high a price to pay.

But President Obama doesn't seem troubled by the price, however high, of maintaining our culture of illusion. Obama's war is an endlessly proliferating war, and increasingly, a war against civilians, even a war against the stability of societies. And Obama is giving up his base, and has disillusioned even the progressives who once argued on his behalf, the people who saw in his candidacy a glimmer of hope, that this nation might get out of its militarism under his leadership, might cease to occupy countries and kill children.

But Obama is just another hollow president with his hollow words proclaiming what a great people we are.

And the unsuccessful Christmas Day bomber, Umar, with his charbroiled balls, becomes the subject of pious magazine articles; articles which do not mull over our vicious foreign policy, but instead speculate about "the mind of a terrorist". Meanwhile, somewhere on an Air Force base in the American West, a pilot is guiding a Reaper drone to the kill zone. He is sitting on the other side of the world as he pulls the trigger on his victims. He watches the video and moves the joystick, like some kid would, in an arcade. He sees a little puff of smoke where the house was. And on the other side of the earth, somewhere in the mountains a whole family perishes: father, mother, children. They are burned to death, blown to pieces, crushed under tons of rubble.

Chris Hedges reveals how war ravages everyone it touches:

War's effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war.

Stand-Up Robbers

by Grayson

Bullets fired by Bonnie and Clyde
in Platte City, 1933. Slugs found
in a bank in Grand Haven, sprayed
into plaster by Baby Face Nelson, 1934.

Banks in South Bend, Sioux Falls,
Bluffton, Indianapolis, East Chicago, Racine,
hit by John Dillinger and various
associates, Nelson, Makley, Pierpont,

Homer Van Meter; as well as armories
in Auburn and Greencastle, where they
helped themselves to shotguns, .45's,
and Thompson submachine guns.

John D. got away with $300,000,
a king's ransom in those days,
before he was sold out and gunned down
by the perverted Hoover's craven cowards.

Nowadays, the bankers are stealing
more than all the Dillingers, Nelsons,
and Van Meters since the invention of
money; the Wall Street boys have misplaced

more than Johnny ever dreamed of; yet,
not one cud-chewing pig-bellied sheriff
or sharp-dressed agent has been
dispatched to look for clues,

to follow leads, to track them,
to seek out snitches; no warrants issued
to search their hotel rooms or their homes,
to take fingerprints, collect evidence;

no order given to pick up
their wives, their girlfriends,
or their whores, for questioning;
no mayors or governors have offered

rewards for their capture,
dead or alive; not one G-Man has
pursued them across state lines;
no rangers nor deputies

have formed posses,
no deals have been cut with their pals
to rat them out, so as to lay for them
outside movie theaters, or hide

in leafy shrubbery at lonely roadsides
to massacre them in their cars
without warning, without so much as a
“Hands up, Johnny!”

But gee-willikers, wouldn't it be swell
to see some real stand-up robbers again,
with John D.'s crooked smile
and that spit-in-your eye wise-cracking

while he cleans out the tellers'
cages and hustles everyone
into the vault,
who aren't pretending to be anything

but what they are;
and wouldn't it be something
to see some good solid rounds
found in some banks again?

Diary Of A Rag And Bone Man

The Continuing Saga of a Homeless Man and his Dog

by Jack Rafter

"He's not right in the head," Gordon said. About Obama.

We were sitting in the library to escape the cold. I had on dark glasses, doing my blind act so I could get Vincent in. Gordon shook his head as he stared at the newspaper spread in front of him--all about the war in Afghanistan, the President sending in 30,000 troops.

Gordon lives in a boxcar. Spends most of his time in the library. Used to be a stock analyst. Now, he can't help it, his mind craves a bone to chew and wants to furnish theories on everything.

"So you're saying he's crazy," I said.

"Crazy in a special way," Gordon said, tapping his pencil on his forehead. "Very special."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, he looks and sounds normal. He has this beautiful shiny wife and these darling little girls. The whole family shines, I don't know how else to put it. They sparkle. If you could make dolls out of them and mass market them, I guarantee you'd be a billionaire inside a month. It'd be the biggest thing since Ken and Barbie. Maybe bigger. It's Ken and Barbie with kids. And they have lots of nice clothes."

"What's that got to do with his being crazy?" I said.

Gordon held his pencil up and poked the air. "I said crazy in a special way. Specialized craziness. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't fix that. You can't give him anything for it. The people closest to him probably can't see it. Although I'm startin' to wonder if his wife has noticed anything unusual. Maybe she has, but, like most devoted wives, she just covers it good, maybe even hides it from herself.

"But the rest of the world, especially all the ones that voted for him, are startin' to wonder what the hell's goin' on. There's this huge gap between what he says and what he does, and there's almost no place where the two items line up, where they converge. So, everyone's goin' around lookin' dumbfounded, like a bunch of tourists left stranded by their tour guide. They're all scratchin' their heads, sayin' things like, 'What's the matter with this guy? Is he crazy? Doesn't he know he's totally wrecking his credibility?'

"And the answer is yes, he's crazy. And no, he doesn't know he's wrecking his credibility. Or if he does, he doesn't know why. And that's because there's actually two people there. There's BARACK OBAMA!! --The savior of mankind, the incarnation of Jesus Christ. That's the one who gives the speeches. And then, there's this other guy, the one we see the rest of the time, whose name might as well be Joe Blow, Rufus Smith or Dick Cheney. Say, you wouldn't have a spare dollar on you, would you?"

"Are you kidding?" I said.
"I just thought if we pooled our money we might make out better for lunch."
"Maybe so," I said.

During the lull, Vincent got up, stretched, and lay down again. I could feel him panting against my leg. Gordon tapped his pencil some more, biting his lower lip. You could hear the springs and wheels clinking in his mind. "It's the speeches, you see. That's where I first noticed it."

"The speeches?"

"Yeah. There's this drama, this explosion that happens. He's a Shakespearean actor. He goes from being Rufus Smith to BARACK OBAMA!! In his speech, he becomes Captain Ahab. Says he's gonna hunt down the great white whale. No, I don't mean something racist. I just mean he's Ahab! He's goin' after this great shiny thing, maybe the greatest thing you ever heard of. Willing to go to the ends of the earth to get it. And we're right with him, boy. We're the crew of the Pequod, and we want him to succeed, we want him to get this thing, too, whatever it is. Why? Because of his speech--his words are so lofty, they soar, they fly clear up to the mastheads, there's religious fervor in his voice, his eyes shine and gleam--they roll back when he cuts loose. He says great things and he believes them. And that's how he gets you and me to believe them. See what I mean? He lifts us up with his words. He charms us, makes us fall in love with him. It's the same thing actors do--exactly the same damn thing. Laurence Olivier wouldn't let people watch him rehearse. You know why?"

I shook my head.

"'Cause he didn't want anyone to see him fumble. Because then all they'd see was this little guy, this mere mortal named Larry. No, first, he had to get it right, you see, had to get to where he believed it himself. Then, when the curtain went up and the lights hit him in the face, he could take off. He could fly in the air. And he became. . .Laurence Olivier. Sir Laurence! And it's the same thing with Obama."

"So you're saying he's like Olivier. . .or Ahab?"

"I'm saying he's whatever in the hell he wants to be when he's makin' a damn speech, 'cause he actually believes it. He says he's goin' after that elusive whale, then that's what he's gonna do. Shoot, in that moment, he probably thinks he can steer the bloody boat all by himself. And throw the harpoon right into the whale's gizzard. Problem is, once the speech is over, once the applause dies down, the lights fade out, and the cheering hysterical mob goes home, he just becomes plain old Rufus again. This little guy in a suit. And you can bet there ain't gonna be no whale huntin' goin' on after that. Man, I'm thirsty. You thirsty? Wish I had a little somethin' to drink."

At that moment, Oscar, another refugee from the trainyard, passed our table clutching a National Geographic. He leaned close on the pass and mumbled, "Better look like you're readin' Braille, Jack. Yonder comes the librarian."

* * *

Well, we went out and scrounged something to eat. When we got back, Gordon was still going on about Obama's alleged craziness. He shoved a book over to me: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. That's Gordon, for you, always reading weird things.

I glanced at the book. It seems that back in 1968, the Sunday Times of London sponsored a single-handed round-the-world yacht race. First prize--L5,000. Naturally, the best sailors in the world entered it. And then there was this unknown, this outsider, a failed businessman from Bridgwater, Somerset, named Donald Crowhurst.

"He was heavily in debt," said Gordon, "and he was after the prize money. Somehow, he thought he could win this thing."

"So what happened?" I said, "And what's this got to do with your theory about Obama?"

"All right," said Gordon, "Just bear with me. Okay, here's this guy, Crowhurst--well, first off, he's married, got a pretty wife, nice children, guy's a real charmer. He's smart, been to school, he reads, he knows all the sailor's jargon. He doesn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out, but he manages to get a financial backer to pay for the boat. Everybody takes him for a pro, but he's not really much more than a weekend sailor. What he is--he's delusional. He's acting out the part of an adventurer. He probably pictures himself sailing home to cheering crowds, knighted by the Queen, like Chichester. He's charmed everybody, including himself. But the story mushrooms. Even before he sets sail, it's a big story. People all over England are rooting for him. He's the underdog and they all want him to succeed."

"Then, he takes off. And right away, he runs into problems. His boat's not as good as he thought it was. He's not making good time. He knows if he drops out of the race he'll have to pay off his backer--the full price of the boat. That would mean selling his house, everything he owns. He'll be ruined. So he makes one of those fateful decisions. He decides to abandon the race. But he doesn't tell anyone. Instead, he more or less stays in one place, sailing around in circles off the coast of Brazil. At the same time, he begins altering his logs, reporting false positions to make it look like he's still in the running. In fact, he makes his reports sound so good that, for awhile, toward the end, he's being cheered worldwide as the likely winner of the race."

And that causes a whole new set of problems. Now Crowhurst realizes that if he actually comes in first, his logbooks are sure to be scrutinized by experienced sailors. And he'll be exposed to the world as a fraud. . . .

In June, '69, Crowhurst's boat was found adrift and abandoned in the Sargasso Sea.

Found in the boat were two sets of logs. One contained the poetic ravings of someone who had become completely unhinged.

Gordon picked up the book, opened it to the first page and handed it back. At the top of the page was this inscription:

PARANOID GRANDIOSITY

"Paranoid grandiosity tends to be well organized, relatively stable and persistent. The complexity of delusional conviction varies from rather simple beliefs in one's alleged talent, attractiveness or inspiration to highly complex, systematized beliefs that one is a great prophet, author, poet, inventor or scientist. The latter extreme belongs to classical paranoia."
Prof. Norman Cameron, Yale
(Ency. Brit.)

copeland morris A DREAM

Wrap-around sunglasses
Ear to ear you wore
In mourning after
The sermon.
The strangeness of a willow
Embraced me once more.

You worried about my dreams;
Addressed me as "sir"
As curtly as you could
In the sedan where I seemed to live.

A man who rolled down the windows,
What must you do for him? Not even God
Can change the past.

Paul Valéry wrote his poems
When he was pulling on socks and shoes:

"God made everything out of nothing,
But the nothingness shows through."

Diary Of A Rag And Bone Man

The Continuing Saga of a Homeless Man and his Dog

by Jack Rafter

Woke up to snow this morning. Damn near froze my ass off last night in my little tent by the train yard. Nights like that make you feel grateful for a dog. Good ol Vincent snuggled up close, kept at least part of me from freezing to death. Problem is the sleeping bag. She's all gone to rot and the feathers are falling out. Gonna have to scrounge another somewhere. We boiled some water over the cookstove, had some oats and coffee. Then broke camp and hightailed it downtown. Straight for the library.

I carry a blind man's fold-up stick in my shoulder bag--got it for a dollar at the Mexican flea-market. So if we go in somewhere, I just get out the stick and put on a pair of dark glasses. Vincent always pulls a little ahead of me on the leash, so with the sunglasses and the stick in play, people think he's a guide dog. That's how I smuggle him in on cold mornings. Some may wonder why he doesn't have the leather harness gizmo with the handle on it, or how come a guide dog looks like it hangs out in junkyards, but they never say anything. Nobody messes with blind people nowadays. They're all scared of lawsuits, and they don't want to look like assholes.

I thought about using the blind act as a panhandling gimmick, but you want to be careful with a thing like that. I figure if it gets you and your dog in out of the rain or cold, that's one thing. But if you use it to enrich yourself, it could turn on you. You don't want to mess with your Kharma. So we walked in.

Well, everybody was there. All the folks from the train yard--there was Billy and Frank and Lena, Oskar and Clarice. All sitting at different tables or hunkered down in comfy chairs. Trying to appear nonchalant in their filthy clothes with unkempt hair and scruffy beards. They all had books in their hands or a magazine, and looked almost studious, like the bedraggled pupils of a hobo cooking class. I nodded to them, subtly, as I walked by. Had to keep looking straight ahead, of course, like I couldn't see them. They knew who I was, so they nodded or winked on the sly. There were others besides them I didn't recognize. I tell you, cold days like this, the library starts looking more and more like a day-shelter for the homeless. The librarians spend half their time being a cop, making sure nobody's asleep. If they are, then out they go. You have to sit there with a book and try to look like you're reading or studying, when all you're really there for is to get warm and think about how you'll score your next meal.

Maybe that's why the city keeps cutting the library hours. God forbid the place should become a haven for outcasts trying to get out of the cold. I read somewhere that Mayor LaGuardia kept the libraries of New York City open clear through the Depression era. The last one, I mean. He knew the homeless were bunching up in those places, but he wasn't gonna shut em out because he had a heart. He also knew it was the one thing people could still do for free--read books. Well, there you go--one more example of the demon socialism.

I spied a friend seated at a table in the history section, so I took a seat across from him. Vincent plopped down on my foot and leaned against my leg. Big smile on his face. I knew he was happy to be out of the cold. So was I.

My friend Gordon was sitting there bent over a newspaper, looking at it real close. Squinting his eyes. That's how you know it's Gordon. You can spot him a mile away. He spends a lot of time in the library even on warm days cause he actually likes to read. He'll spend upwards of eight hours at a stretch reading. Today it was the newspaper. But it could be anything. Novels, poetry, plays, history, music, art, travel journals, you name it. Definitely a sick man. He needs glasses, but he won't buy them cause he doesn't have the money.

He's a strange dude. Used to be a stock-broker. Had him a wife and kids, cell phone, SUV, the whole nine yards. Then the crash came. He lost a lot of money--his own, and other peoples' too. He almost jumped out the window of his twenty-second floor office, but something changed his mind.

He went through his savings. Lost his home. His wife divorced him. He was a little crazy for awhile. Maybe still is. Hard to tell. He's on some meds, I believe, but he forgets to take them. He moves around a lot. He started out staying in a friend's garage. After the friend kicked him out, he showed up with a tent and lived in the freight train camp. That's where I met him. From there, he went to a salvage yard where he took up residence in the back of a wrecked Volvo station wagon. He was there almost a month. Then it was a condemned house for two months, a dilapidated barn for a week, followed by a tool shed behind a machine shop.

The tool shed was interesting. He figured out how to pick the lock. He only stayed there at night after the machinists went home, and he was always careful to put the lock back on the door in the morning. He said he really liked the tool shed cause it had a portable electric heater nobody was using and a grimy old radio that still worked. Also, the machinists kept regular hours and they were predictable. So he stayed there six months and nobody had a clue someone was living there.

Then one night a workman showed up needing some tool or other from the shed. He heard music playing softly--Gordon had the radio tuned to a classical station to lull him to sleep--Debussy's Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Fawn. The machinist turned him over to the cops. He spent three months in jail for breaking and entering, trespass, and vagrancy.

He now lives in a boxcar at the freight yards.

When I sat down, he said, "Hi, Jack," without looking up from his paper. I said hello, Gordon. Then, he held up a hand and said, "I'll be with you in a minute." I looked at the paper. He appeared to be reading about the president's latest machinations--sending more troops to Afghanistan. Added to the ones already there it would make a total of a hundred-thousand troops. Gordon made little groaning sounds and shook his head. He squinted his eyes.

"You oughta get yourself some glasses," I said after awhile.
"I know," he muttered. Then held up his hand again, so I shut up. He kept reading, squinting, groaning. Finally, he shook his head and mumbled something.
"What's that?" I said.
"I said there's something wrong with him."
"Wrong with who?"
"With the O-man. Obama."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean there's something not right about him."
"You mean he's crazy?"
"No, not crazy. Not exactly."
"Well, what do you mean, then?" I said.

Gordon picked up a pencil and stared at it for a moment, his eyes almost crossed. "I mean he's not right in the head."