Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Sudden awakening from a 10-year nightmare...

"Guernica" - Pablo Picasso

Footage of the devastating floods of Vermont -the destruction of the irreplaceable covered bridges, the entire sides of old, old buildings that have stood at the crossroads of villages for more than a century washed away in the deluge - scrolled across my television screen while Willie crooned "Moonight In Vermont" and strummed fabulous jazz chords, the kind Chuck Berry said "don't make no money," the kind Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, and others produced so effortlessly on the late night FM band when I was a kid.

They made it so easy to listen, the cats like Art Tatum and Stan Getz, Monk and Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Paul Desmond.

Michele Bachmann had provided some comic relief to the afternoon edition of "Democracy Now" after Amy Goodman interviewed a hatchet-faced Yankee who owns one of the last truly independent radio stations in New England. He chatted about how he gets offers to sell out almost every day from the giant megacorporations in an industry where information and music comes canned from satellite dishes located far, far out of state - out of the region. He said his dad and his grandfather often said a big part of the local economy is the turning of the leaves in spring and autumn, the time when people from everywhere come to see just what it's all about.

The point is that during the current emergency, the local radio station is busy telling people which bridges are open, how to get to high ground, and where the path to safety may be found. It's done through emergency generators, the kind of information provided for the public necessity and convenience, something the law only winks at these days, the gentleman from Vermont said.

Ms. Bachmann piously informed the world it's all a sign from God Almighty, the Creator Himself, that it's time to balance the budget, cut the federal spending, snap the books back in line, this thing of earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and a dramatic rise in temperatures.

Ms. Goodman's next guest was the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, the former Chief of Staff of the Army of the United States of America - all hail the United States of America - a gentleman named Lawrence Wilkerson who served Gen. Powell as he committed himself in public at the United Nations and the world watched, bought into the lies spun by the Bush Administration, the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney.

For his presentation, they covered Picasso's mural, "Guernica," the cubist expression of what bombing of civilian targets looks like when it's woven into a tapestry and hung on the wall of a fabulous building erected with the money provided by the estate of an oil baron such as John D. Rockefeller, the noted creator of the Standard Oil trust. They covered it with a tarp so the television cameras could not depict Mr. Picasso's work of art. The story goes that once when a Gestapo agent visited his apartment in Paris, he saw a sketch of the mural and asked, "Who did that?"

The story goes that Mr. Picasso replied, "You did it."

This man Wilkerson is ramrod straight, his features set in stone; there's no sign of a sense of humor in his words, in his affect, in his tone of voice.

These are the words of a man who worked for an honors graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, a place where Duty, Honor, Country means you don't lie - ever - about the things that are important, things like chemical warfare, thermonuclear devices, deadly weaponized germs, poison gases.

Earlier, Ms. Goodman played a clip of Vice President Cheney's appearance on NBC, saying that he would support water boarding by foreign intelligence services acting as U.S. contractors all over again, secret prisons, surreptitious wiretapping, renditions of persons from locations in the continental U.S. to remote locations in other nations in a contravention of the guarantee of the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

Mr. Wilkerson begins to spin a tale about someone code named "Curve Ball," an unreliable agent of the German BND, and how the director of Central Intelligence persuaded he and General Powell that the weapons of mass disappearance were, in fact, in place and a threat to the people of the U.S., Israel, the western world, that the Iraqis were training Al Qaeda operatives - and the list goes on - and on - until he runs out of words.

Then he tells the truth, as he and the general later learned it. Too late.

The "intelligence" was gleaned by the repeated near drowning of a man in a secret dungeon in Cairo, a person repeatedly made to believe he would not last through the latest inundation, a person who would have told you he created the world, killed Jesus, Cock Robin, or President Kennedy, if he thought it would get him another breath of air.

Mr. Cheney told the interviewer that when his book of memoirs appears, "Heads will explode all over Washington." He says the White House was "not well served' by the Secretary of State - among other remarks.

Asked for his opinion, Mr. Wilkerson dead-panned, and told Ms. Goodman that after listening to the interview of the man from Vermont and the report on the earthquake, the hurricane, the flooding, he characterized Mr. Cheney's remarks as "singularly insignificant."

As to heads exploding "all over Washington," he compared that witty comment to something one would read in "a supermarket tabloid."

It was at that point that The Legendary, in the privacy of his own home, bellowed out a horse laugh you could have heard in Cow Town, 100 miles away. It was then and there that The Legendary shouted in glee, "All hail Lawrence Wilkerson! I salute you, sir, for you are one some kind of wild and beautiful child running free in a world of total shit!"

So mote it be.

I tell you, enough is enough, and now I'm wide awake and ready for anything.

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