PHOTOGRAPH: BRIT SCHULTE

For some time I have been communicating with a young man on death row in Livingston, Texas; an innocent young man. His name is Robert G. Will, Rob to his friends. He sends me, along with more personal letters, his "Diary From Death Row," which I type and another volunteer posts on his website freerobwill.org.

I urge you all to go to his website and read his diary. You will never be the same. And once you know, and can no longer unknow, I'm positive you will add to the growing numbers of people around the world, and most notably, Americans who can no longer tolerate our heinous system of capital punishment.

There is much information on the Internet to sway even the staunchest supporters of this murderous act of revenge we call justice. You can start here. Inform yourselves. Be braver than brave and take a stand against capital punishment.

For regular updates and a growing sense of support for Rob become his friend on facebook.

Please read Rob's latest diary entry from death row:

I Must Fight.

Anything Less Is Treason To Humanity.

February 5, 2011, Saturday, 9:45 P.M. P.M.

“When the world is pregnant with lies a long hidden Sacred Truth will be revealed.”—Ancient Odinist Prophecy

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act..”—George Orwell

Quiet. Quiet at 9:45 P.M.—especially on a Saturday night—is a blessing. I do believe that the noisemakers and sports fanatics wore themselves out during the day with excessive hoopla in anticipation of the Super Bowl tomorrow. Oh yes, tomorrow will be insane, an absolute madhouse—men leaping about their cages with fervent glee, beating on their cell doors and screaming at the top of their lungs. Coping mechanism bliss. Imagine really living in an Orwellian environment, imagine how heavily this would weigh on your mind. Some would say out overall society is quite Orwellian—and interestingly enough I’ve heard several right wing commentators suggest this recently—but the Orwellian nature of this environment is overtly clear and distinctly evident.

I mean, it’s all here: Thought Police, doublethink, surveillance cameras everywhere, prolefeed, duckspeak…whew, just thinking about it is exhausting. Let me go wash some clothes and listen to this Groove-Soul-Jazz House show on KPFT, soak up this beautiful music…oh, wow, a song with excerpts from MLK speeches and now a Marvin Gay House Jazz remix—it can’t get much better than this!…And I did some Yoga, Shaolin Warrior Qi Gong, weight training and Jujitsu. If the beetlemen come to murder me they are going to have some very serious problems. Back to Orwell, but first do I dare?…Do I dare commit this act of bravery? Let me go to my door…O.K., my neighbor’s light is out and it looks like all of the other cell lights are off. O.K., I just took my earplugs out; hopefully I won’t be assaulted with any more hoopla tonight, but on never knows—the Great Hoopla Beast can be sneaky, suddenly appearing out of the beautiful quiet and devouring it and then immediately replacing it with maniacal pandemonic chaos! Some brief recollections on some passages from Orwell’s 1984:

“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sports, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sensational song.”

This place doesn’t actually produce such things but these things are ever-present highly sought after here. Crime novels, shuck and jive radio shows, action movies guys can catch on their radios, urban novels, trite men’s magazines—these things are ever-popular in this environment.

“It was curious how that beetlelike type proliferated proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.”

This perfectly describes the warden and major who come from the Walls Unit to pick up people and take them back to the Unite to be executed. Extremely curious—this description of Orwell’s beetlemen really does fit the Walls Unit Warden and Major with eery and creepy precision. My God. I don’t want the horrible beetlemen to come to take me away. … Whew, O.K., I just had to breathe deeply a few times.

“…petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep [the proles] in control was not difficult…And even when they became discontented as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”

Terrifying, absolutely terrifying. This passage is so very relevant to this environment. Need I even include any commentary at all? I don’t think so, or at least not much—I’ll go ahead and say a few things I suppose. Myself and the few others who have engaged, and continue to engage in what I suppose could be called psycho sociopolitical activism have made much progress, but we’re up against a Behemoth. This is the hardest environment imaginable to organize in this place—which is a Control Unit Prison—designed by psychiatrists to destroy the human Mind, Body, Spirit, and Soul.

There are scholars and academics who have suggested that the death penalty is a form of sexual control and the reason those in power who support the death penalty do not want to abolish it—even though capital punishment serves no valid societal purpose—is because they do no want to relinquish any sort of control or power. This is an interesting theory. One of the most horrible things about this place is that the vast majority, 98% of guys willingly walk to their own execution. The devious Party Man and dedicated Myrmidon to Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien spoke of power:

“Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing…power is power over human beings. Over the body—but above all the mind. Power over matter—external reality as you would call it—is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute…we control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull…”

I read a transcript of an interview with members of the TDC execution “tie-down team,” the group of officers who actually strap people to the gurney right before they’re murdered. One of them talked about how the guys who are about to be executed thank them, they’re nice and friendly to them, and they thank their murderers. This is the most sick and twisted thing imaginable and I’ve seen similar depraved interactions between officers and inmates who are scheduled to die. Again, Orwell’s O’Brien:

“…no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured…The party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies: we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?

We are not content with negative obedience nor even with abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his mind, we reshape him…we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely heart and soul…even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.”

Most TDC officers aren’t O’Brien-type party men, they just “do their job, they’re cogs in a wheel of the larger machine and they’re not conscious of their place within the machine. There are devious and treacherous O’Briens here and I’ve known some of them and have had extremely interesting conversations with them. I actually have always been able to interact decently with the intelligent, deviously Machiavellian types—even in the midst of heated battle but the slap-stupid, ignorant-to-the-point-of-obscenity, almost incomprehensibly witless fools are the ones I have problems with. There was one high-ranking officer who used to work here who was on a real-deal O’Brien type vibe. I’ll call him “Officer X”. Officer X and I battled and then came to a sort of mutual understanding after he realized that none of the psychological tactics of social control that he was so fond of utilizing would work on me and that it was in his best interest and the best interest of “the Part” to not try to use them on me.

Officer X was good, very good at breaking people and he loved doing so—he really fancied himself some type of modern day Draco or perhaps a more fitting comparison would be a more intelligent version of the warden from the movie Cool Hand Luke (or maybe a TDC Mubarek!). One day I was out on visitation on the day a guy had an execution date. He was in a visitation cage about to be taken to be executed, when Officer X came around the corner and cast his glance in his direction. The suddenly like a hawk who has spotted easy prey he darted over to the cage and he did his thing—a twisted macabre scene ensued: Officer X forced his Will To Power upon the guy and made him “follow the rules” and shave right there in the cage.

Do you understand the depth of the depravity of this? The guy was about to be executed in a few hours and Officer X forced him to comply with an asinine order. (Note: Enforcement of petty demands is a strategic tool utilized in control unit prisons to breed a Pavlovian-style complacency. Echoes of O’Brien:

“By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow…and love of Big Brother…

What happens here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or of living or laughter, or curiosity or courage or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves…

The heretic, the enemy of society will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again…Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling your feet of his own accord.”

Before guys are executed they take the handcuffs off and 98% of the guys walk to the gurney, they fully participate in their own murder. I’ve seen it too many times—guys laughing and joking with their murderers as they lead them of to be executed. Once, I watched as a man was led off to be executed and he said these last words to the other inmates present: “They’ve been good to me, the, the officers have been good to me, they, they’ve been good to me…” And then he was loaded into the death van and taken to the Walls Unit and murdered. This person was on death row for about 12 years and was repeatedly oppressed by officers and openly acknowledged that he was well aware of the oppressive conditions of this environment.

You best believe that there are those in our society who would love to create some type of Orwellian, Huxleyian, Margaret Atwood A Handmaids Tale type of world. Hell, just listen to some of the ultra Right Wing talk shows, they say as much. These are the same people who virulently support capital punishment. I understand this. I understand that this place, Texas Death Row, is a microcosm of the larger U.S. Society and indeed the World. I must act, I must fight—anything less is treason to Humanity. The last line of Orwell’s 1984 reads, “He loved Big Brother.” Mark my words on the scroll of life, write them in the Sacred Stone of people’s History: I will never ever, ever love Big Brother.

A Rebel-Jazz Trumpet Call: Come Now! And Dance To the Music Of a Thought Crime Renaissance!

Rob Will

WONDER WHEEL

love’s been on my mind of late

and if and when it falls away

we ride out in a subway car

heading for the coney shore

for more

it’s about loving your face

it’s about finding our place

on top of the wonder wheel

oh listen to those little girls squeal

on top of the wonder wheel

days grow short and nights grow lean

and if we ever lose the dream

we’ll make our way along the pier

trust the ocean keep it near

no fear

it’s about loving your face

it’s about finding our place

on top of the wonder wheel

oh listen to those little girls squeal

on top of the wonder wheel

life goes sailing through the strait

and if we ever fade to gray

find ourselves in a world of light

incandescent in the night

dark night

it’s about loving your face

it’s about finding our place

on top of the wonder wheel

oh listen to those little girls squeal

on top of the wonder wheel

dreamland takes us round and round

dreaming high above the crowd

it’s about loving your face

it’s about finding our place

on top of the wonder wheel

there’s room up there for everything real

on top of the wonder wheel

WONDER WHEEL ©2011

Words & music by Paul Fairall & Linda Danz

Hear the song on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/paulfairallmusic.com

There's nothing you can know that isn't known. —John Lennon

GOODBYE & HELLO

I don’t like marking time. Birthdays, anniversaries, or how many years it’s been since a farm in Woodstock was overrun with a bunch of naked interlopers go unobserved. Neither do I count the years since John Lennon was shot or the time that has passed since a certain cloudless day one September. The Mister patiently cues me from a stumble when someone asks how long we’ve been married.

We had an old friend who felt the same as we do and so, for some time, managed the anti-holiday of Christmas with a vegetarian dinner for just the three of us, never acknowledging the stressful clamor that always came in the weeks—now more recently months—leading up to it. We just found a reason to spend a little money on a good bottle of port, to raise a glass and show gratitude for our enduring friendship, feeling all the better for it. A little after-dinner rant on the state of things bolstered by a Christmas pudding alight before we saw him to the bus stop.

This year would be different. Our friend died a few days before Christmas. His passage from admittance to the emergency room at Beth Israel to his quiet death in ICU was swift—a mere five or six weeks—and completely unexpected. So, bereft, we invited a few friends who had the pleasure of meeting Charlie in this life and we walked in the North Woods in Central Park on a brisk afternoon before returning to our place for Christmas dinner. Instead of the ubiquitous carols distorted more often by underage pop stars, which start just after Labor Day now, we played Cole Porter. Christmas crackers were pulled and snapped with abandon. Puns read aloud, tiny plastic games soon discarded. Our heads sweaty from paper hats, we raised a glass and toasted my old friend.

At midnight on Christmas I came down with the dreaded lurgy. The Mister took the fall a mere 24 hours later. For the next four days we slept separately, our coughing fits echoing across the apartment, and probably scaring the bejeezus out of the cats. I missed the big snowstorm. We had one goal though, and that was to get to Montauk for the New Year. Our holiday. Some astute astrologer may more relevantly call it Happy Calendar Change but it’s the New Year for us. The only one we celebrate, not as a time marker, but for the faith in the future and what good things the New Year will bring.

Early on New Year’s Eve we left the care of our cats in the hands of a good friend who wanted a weekend in the city. Coughing intermittently, we bundled into our rental car and headed off to Montauk; our first and only stop at the California Diner on Sunrise Highway. After days without solid food I had visions of BIG BREAKFAST and when the plump and cheerful waitress queried: “Cawfee forya both?” I nearly cried. I ordered big: eggs, home fries, toast, and a side of silver dollar pancakes. The Mister stared at substantial wedges of French toast on the plate before him. It was too much, too soon.

It wasn’t just the flu that had done us in. If I was an old queen I might call it our Annus Horribilis. But, I’m not. So I just call it life. 2010 was a year that brought a lot of sadness with the death of two people close to us. One, a friend who had suffered brain tumors for some thirteen years, and for whom I had been an advocate, finally succumbed. Years ago, when her mother was no longer physically able to accompany her daughter to the many doctors and treatments she underwent I stood in and took the responsibility. For years I read aloud to her after every surgery, and there were many. I attended every doctor and oncologist appointment with her, kept notes and passed that information along to her unresponsive family. I helped her at home, shopped for her and for as long as I could I got her out of her homebound funk to a movie or lunch at a neighborhood diner when walking became too much of a trial. We’d taken to seeing children’s films and Tim Burton’s Alice and Toy Story were the last. When the Good Queen in Alice supposed that her sister had such a huge head because something was growing on her brain, my friend gripped my hand in the darkened theater—and then we laughed. No one in her family seemed willing to step up until the end, of course, and then the kind of family dynamic that oozes guilt spread like a stain. I was shocked at the calculated efforts of some—including a parent—to rewrite their own histories.

She died in September and not a month later my old friend Charlie took ill quite unexpectedly. We called him Fairy Godfather. I met him when I was divorcing the first husband many, many years ago and Charlie was divorcing the church. We could not have been more different and yet had such a strong bond practically from the moment we met. When I married The Mister, he and Charlie became fast friends. We three were 12 years apart in age, all born in the Year of the Boar. When I lost my job he kept our heads above water. You get a lifelong commitment of friendship when you have a boar for a friend.

He died a few days before Christmas. His death was a great blow to us. Over the years we had spoken nearly every day and as he got older when he was feeling flustered by some little thing we talked on the phone three and four times in a day. The Mister came to his aid when something needed fixing, like his computer or his TV. If he felt poorly I shopped for him, carefully adhering to the list of a man who lived a tightly controlled existence, that part of the priesthood he never quite shook free of. He came to us for dinner once a month, religiously. I sent him home with leftovers. When he was generous with cash for our birthdays we turned around and took him out to dinner, spending that cash. He loved his Bombay gin martini, very dry, with an onion. He called very early one morning in November to tell me he had no feeling in his legs. I wanted him to get to the hospital as soon as possible. A friend of his, a former lover, pooh-poohed his fears and wasted some time before finally getting the same, more urgent, directive from a clinic in the neighborhood. I spent the next 10 hours with Charlie in the emergency room at Beth Israel, joined later by The Mister. He was seen by a troop of doctors and specialists, and endured a battery of tests including 4 MRIs at a go. I looked at the scans that showed a large mass on his lower back.

We spent as much time with him in hospital as we could. We brought him cookies from Veniero’s to sweeten his nurses. There were two books that he’d requested, The Odyssey and Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis. He breezed through Mame. Reading the Odyssey was, in Charlie’s words, a preparation for his own odyssey and the going was much slower, more careful. I heard this, of course, and trembled at the meaning. On November 20^th I noted in my journal: “I think Charlie will leave us very soon.” Still, we kept things light and respected his wishes not to dwell on what was really happening to him. He, a fiercely self-sufficient giant of a man, let me feed him.

Our final visit lasted 7 hours. His doctor had prepped me for the radical change in our friend. His odds went from 6 months to a mere few days and on our last visit Charlie was already making his way from this world. As his health proxy I made sure the doctor understood Charlie’s wishes and all but the basic tubes were withdrawn. I saw that he had carefully marked his place in The Odyssey, that there were still some 175 pages or so to go. I felt sure Charlie knew we were in the room and I took up the book and I read aloud. I read and read and read. At first I stopped whenever someone came in to attend to him, but I was encouraged to keep reading. So I did. The Mister slipped into a chair beside me, sometimes rising to stroke Charlie’s arm, or his head, and I continued to read, and read, and read. Little movements from Charlie I took to be acknowledgments. I’d read the last lines and another old friend of ours who had been introduced to Charlie fairly recently arrived to say good-bye. As we left, Charlie stirred and opened his eyes. He died a few hours later in the night.

Charlie lived a cloistered life in a tiny room in Chelsea. That lover from his past and someone who’d remained in his life refused to allow me any emotion in our conversations. Once he took on my concerns he wished aloud that Charlie would go sooner than later. He dismissed my tale of Charlie’s good-bye to us: “We can make our own interpretations.” He called that morning and coldly announced, “It’s done.” He couldn’t talk about a memorial to celebrate the life of our friend. He was too emotionally distraught himself, he said. He kept his emotions hidden, he said. And no, he could not join us for Christmas to raise a toast to our friend; it would be too much for him to bear. Yet, it did not hamper him one bit to wrap up Charlie’s affairs that would benefit him in a heartbeat. Surprise to see him at our door was short-lived when he immediately asked me for some things Charlie had given me for safekeeping, a credit card among them. His grief did not prevent him from telling us on our Christmas walk that he and the superintendent of Charlie’s building were making a deal to sublet the rent stabilized apartment and split a healthy rise between them. His grief took over again when we returned to my place, and having got what he came for, he slid quietly from our midst.

We really needed to be in Montauk.

I consider it always to be a good sign for our annual trip through Long Island when Billy Joel comes over the airwaves. Okay, that’s an easy reach but it is, really, still rock and roll to me. We sailed along to the oldies on the nearly empty Southern State, passed by a few SUVs with anti-Obama bumper stickers. The vineyards, more flattened under the invisible boot of winter were swept above with geese lazily re-forming in a liquid “V” pattern. When one radio station sputtered out, we chanced on Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and that sublime orchestration took us all the way to Montauk.

Near tropical temps greeted us when we checked into The Royal Atlantic—that and the evidence of massive erosion, which had taken a big chunk of the beach, not to mention the stairs from the hotel to the beach. All along the seafront hotels perched precariously above empty space where, you know, sand had been. Pyramids of new sand were waiting to be put in place. We overheard two men we thought might be local: “Someone spent a lotta money on this pile of sand—mason quality—and it’s gonna wash right into the water like nuthin’.”

Unpacking I realized quite quickly that, although I had thought to bring that extra pair of boots and gloves I had completely underestimated my boggled state and forgotten to pack any clothes! A quick trip to Main Street and I was soon outfitted in a brand new yellow hoodie; “Montauk” emblazoned across the front.

Over the next few days we saw more evidence of erosion when we hiked the nature trails along the ocean cliffs—or what is left of them. Many years ago when I was a full time painter I made train excursions to Montauk loaded down with French easel, paints, prepared paper and the requisite supply of bourbon. I hiked along the beach to where eerie geological formations clawed into the sand and rose like sci-fi creatures in a Dr. Who episode above an intrepid walker. Early European travelers called these formations “hoodoos” which comes from the word voodoo. They believed they were evil and caused bad luck. Native Americans, much earlier residents, believed the hoodoos housed spirits. I’d set my easel down in the sand and until the tide licked at my boots I painted these glorious spirits. Now, they are nothing more than undernourished reflections of their former fearsome grandiosity. The ocean will reclaim them sooner than later.

Development is more aggressive in Montauk, sadly visible high along the nature trail in Shadmoor State Park, which will further stress an already limited fresh-water supply. The guy who owns J.Crew has bought the old Warhol Estate along with the oldest working ranch in America nearby. The rich can hunker down in all this beauty and not worry that the few markets in the village don’t (yet) carry the kind of high-end vittles they are used to. “They don’t run out of milk, this bunch,” says The Mister.

When we drive out to the Point for a look at the lighthouse I never fail to eye the huge, and still immobile, SAGE radar rising above Camp Hero. The old military facility is a scrubbed up version of its former abandoned self and not nearly as much fun as when, just having devoured The Montauk Trilogy by Peter Moon, we skittered under barbed wire and explored with beating hearts the place where ancient pyramids, aliens and mind control experiments were said to have existed. So, when that radar screen starts up again…

Our stay in the village was quiet. Late lunch at the Shagwong on the eve and a brisk walk to the ocean at midnight, wrapped in each other’s arms, contemplating another year together. On New Year’s Day we ventured into O’Murphey’s for a meal that came with the waitress’s warning: Wa-a-ay over-sized portions. We never got the perfect Manhattan we’d craved because neither we, nor the bartender had our hearts in it.

There was no getting around the sadness we left back in Manhattan. “Let’s not leave before we leave,” The Mister prompted and it seems very good advice indeed. We talked about the new songs still to be written, new stories, the start of a new novel for me. We have no one to please but ourselves. We have friends who struggle like we do, would lend a hand in a heartbeat, and we are all still above ground. There are discoveries still to be made, stories still to be written, songs to be sung. There are things worth fighting for and it doesn’t matter that one man or woman’s idea of an exciting discovery is to travel to the farther reaches of the globe for the culinary experience of eating the heart of a fawn smothered in onions. It doesn’t matter that people here are blind to the rampant injustice of capital punishment. It doesn’t mean a thing if people react on fb with knee-jerkiness that kicks aside any attempt at broadening the debate. It only matters that once I know something I can’t unknow it. That living an informed life leads more often to positive action. Death doesn’t matter; only the living matter. My old friend Miriam, having lived at least 90 years on this planet recently said to me, “There comes a time, sweetie, when we agree to be recycled.”

My friend and neighbor was inexplicably teary-eyed on our return when I brought her a handful of eggs we had too many of. It was crazy she said, how we could live side by side in our quiet worlds and not see, nor speak to, each other for days, absorbed by our respective writing. But she missed me when I was gone and she was glad we were friends. So, some have said good-bye but I say hello.

Annus mirabilis. We might just have that yet.

CLICK ON THE LINK FOR MONTAUK PHOTOGRAPHS

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059836&id=1583324913&l=1d47c0db3c

“The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.”—Mark Twain

GOD HATES SNUGGIES

POLLYBOLLOCKS, guest blogger

This afternoon The American Friend watched live feed of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington D.C. It looked cold in that town, judging from the hats and scarves. I’m far too nice to say anything bad about a bunch of people who drove all the way to the Capitol for this event on a day they could have been kicking up autumn leaves or doing something, you know, meaningful. So, I will step outside normal for a change and allow my good friend and relentless ranter, Pollybollocks, to be guest blogger. She’s not a gal to be bridled and prefers always the un as in unbridled, undiminished, unconvinced and unimpressed, to name a few uns.

Welcome Pollybollocks:

Cheers! The American Friend and I have not known each other for very long, but have already formed a deep bond, almost like alter egos, you might say. I’m younger than she is and beautiful. My hair is thick and healthy and my teeth are strong and white. I have no need of a job, nor do I require health insurance like my poor friend. I do whatever I like, when I like. I am a Native New Yorker, just like my American Friend. But where we differ is I am one-quarter black, one-quarter white, one-quarter Native American and three-quarters Amazonian. My grandmother was Chinese. I am a transgendered Lesbian who loves men and is in a committed relationship with a few straights, many more gays and we have a rainbow family of above-average children who have never been to Lake Woebegone. I don’t care about syntax or grammar if it gets in the way, though I don’t think spell-check is invading my freedoms. Yet.

So, when she asked me to guest blog on that lame-o event in Washington D.C. I readily accepted. And it was lame. A few hundred million mostly white people drove many, many miles for long hours to basically see a kinda crap Daily Show. Outside. In the cold. I knew it was gonna be a washout when they started off with the feckin’ WAVE bullshit. Oh, yeah, my mama was a Brit so I slide into that every now and again. Cute, innit? Anyway, why didn’t they all just go to a football game? They had the weather for it. But I digress.

Now if some celebrity (and to be honest I hadn’t a feckin’ clue who those two guys were who were so obviously put onstage to wind up the audience) called me part of a meat orchestra I’d be pretty put out. It was a WHITE meat orchestra, if you please. Very nearly everyone in the crowd looked white. I didn’t see many, or even a few, black and brown faces in that cheerful crowd. Maybe they were in the back of the mall, wa-a-ay in the back. Elmo and Big Bird were easily spotted in their bright orange and yellow costumes and I thought fleetingly: “Maybe there are African American persons in those costumes.” There were a fair number of black performers onstage so how can I bitch? Watch me.

So the crowd was missing its color. Better yet, where were the Robocops, Star Wars assault weapons and mounted police on horses bred to be twenty-feet tall with nostrils flared at the scent of a protester? Where were the thunderous black helicopters drowning out the revolutionary message from the speakers below? Oh, right. The least they could have done was a flyover for that poem read by the always-avuncular Sam Waterston. That begged to be drowned out. Where were the goddamned FREE-SPEECH pens!

Father Guido Sarducci was dragged out of retirement to deliver the invocation. He is OLD! Though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. My American Friend is heading down that road. But what is unforgivable are old jokes. At least he wasn’t a raging homophobic Fundamentalist preacher, like the one who opened the Inaugural ceremony for, um, President Obama.

Cat Stevens, now known as Yusef, gave me a glimmer of hope, though I wondered how the hell he finally got his visa. Nice that Stewart coached the WHITE crowd on the pronunciation of the singer’s first name, conveniently ignoring his last name, which is Islam, just in case it sounded too, you know, Muslim-y. I am not a cringer by nature but I damned near cringed when reformed bat-eater Ozzy Osbourne took the stage with Yusef—pronounced Joseph. An epic battle of the Peace Trains ensued. Not. If that’s what Yusef had to promise to get stateside then I haz a sad, a big feckin’ sad. Whatever the hell Ozzy was promised I don’t wanna know.

The O Jays came on—three of them—and my American Friend’s husband, who she coyly (too coyly I think) calls “The Mister,” wondered aloud: “I thought there were four of them.” There’s a conspiracy behind that I’m sure. They cleverly amended their hit song to “…tell all the folks in Egypt and Israel too….” I guess Palestinians didn’t rhyme with anything. Nor would apartheid, poverty, fear, and blockade, it seems.

Who IS this audience? In the spirit of sanity they went all that way to watch a giant monitor. Why is former flight attendant Steve Slater—a drunk who, okay, got fed up with asshole passengers on his flight—why is he still in the bloody news? Oh and another class act, Teresa Giudice, whose New Jersey housewife voice I never, ever hope to hear ever again in my entire life. Ever. Is this what these people are watching? God help America.

In front of a backdrop—a small forest really—of American flags and the Capitol building Stewart asked the question we had all been waiting for. “Was this rally a tremendous success—or—a horrendous failure?” Let me think. Yeah, I’ll side step that, for now.

Medals were given out, sanity awards. To. A. Baseball. Player. Who couldn’t accept it because he was a trillion miles from Washington. Was there no one worthy who might have been closer, who could have appeared in person to accept the award? Thankfully yeah, that cute dude, Jacob Isom, who bravely stole a Koran from a right-wing nut job that was going to burn it. And then Jacob—Jake to me, now—said simply, “Thank You” and tossed his medal into the audience. Why isn’t he running for President?

The program actually grew some teeth—okay baby teeth—when it took NPR to task, among other news outlets, for not allowing their employees to attend the rally. So, the medal of a naked man running with scissors was presented to a seven-year-old girl who has more courage than an NPR employee. At least she was there to accept the award in person.

Some of the signs were…cute. My favorite: GOD HATES SNUGGIES.

Sad Jeff Tweedy, who my American Friend loves, teamed up with Mavis Staples and they sang a sad, sad song. Velma Hart accepted the award for reasonableness. They showed a clip of President Obama. Three days before Election Day. Smooth move, Dems. Nobody said a word about exploding printer cartridges. It wasn’t that kind of crowd. Anderson Cooper’s tight black t-shirt won an award. Kid Rock was resurrected to, in his words, perform the only serious song of the day. He even used the word ironic, because Tweedy and Mavis weren’t serious enough, or ironic. Kid meant to say the only bad song of the day but whatever. He had Sheryl Crow getting the crowd to clap along to profound lyrics like: “I can’t stop the war, shelter the homeless, feed the poor. The least that I can do is care.” Yeah, well that is the feckin’ least you can do. But you can volunteer at a homeless shelter, tutor an inner city kid, work to abolish the death penalty, protest the war and man the lines at a soup kitchen, you feckin eejit. Yay passive America! Home of the Free, Land of the Let Somebody Else Do It. Sheryl, undeterred from sunshiney lyrics, implored her audience to “…dance ‘till our troubles fade away.” The yellow bouncing ball? Shoot me before I follow along with one of those. Sing what, exactly? Ba bup ba ba ba…”

O-o-oh, but they took a swipe at Mark Zuckerberg. Then they posted the whole thing on facebook. He’s shaking in his Birkenstocks.

At around half-time the cameras panned over an audience checking their cell phones, texting embellished accounts of their lame day and thinking: “OMG, the gridlock will be hellish getting out of this place.” And I was beginning to wax nostalgic for the kids in black hoodies and face scarves that can be counted on at every antiwar protest to burn the flag. (Full disclosure: I always chastise those little brats.) I certainly did miss the real protest songs of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, noticeable by their absence. I could tell my American Friend wondered where all the free and reduced rate bus rides were that had got hundreds of thousands of unemployed and financially strapped citizens across the country to rallies in the past. There were those HuffPo busses but they got there kinda late. Dawn departure? From SOHO? I think not. Many in the crowd attending the rally were probably employed, students, or young people who had parents who were employed. Jon Stewart asked: “You guys having a nice time so far?”

The low points of the event, if that’s even possible, was some Daily Show huckster—on the monitor— selling the “I Was There” certificate (oh, the irony) and an exchange between Stewart and Colbert in matching American Flag-patterned fleece that was less ingenious than any 4^th grader in a schoolyard skirmish: “Everyone has a right to be patriotic!” “Why don’t you marry it then?”

I’m a cynic. So shoot me.

Last night I was a fly on the shoulder of my American Friend who attended a fundraiser with The Mister and a couple of their dear friends at The Brecht Forum, which is an independent educational and cultural center downtown. It was billed as “A Halloween Party to Stop the FBI Witch Hunt.” The FBI had recently raided the homes & offices of anti-war and international solidarity activists in several cities, issuing subpoenas to appear before a grand jury. It was a fun night and my American Friend and The Mister met lovely people dedicated to important causes. I had been warned by my American Friend to stay out of sight and not to breathe one cynical word. I watched helplessly as she engaged a perfectly lovely woman who planned on going to the Stewart rally the next day. I could see how perplexed my American Friend was. She mentioned that if only there was so much attention to the loss of civil liberties, the need to show a powerful force that could have thwarted the heinous Patriot Act in early days after 9/11. The nice woman responded by urging her to “Stay in the moment dear.” “Say something,” I prodded in an urgent whisper. “Please, please, just tell her you are in the feckin’ moment and wouldn’t be in this particularly disastrous feckin’ moment in our country’s time if people had taken to the streets like she did and a handful of others a month after 9/11. None of us would be facing this shit—what civil liberties we have lost, the rise of a corporate-designed and funded Tea Party, and allowing baggage inspectors to cop a free feel, if it had not taken so long for people to see what our government had in store for us.” But she’s too nice.

My American Friend was forced to miss the last half hour of the televised rally this afternoon. Because she is unemployed and seemingly unemployable, she walks dogs for grocery money. Partly by choice, as she can follow that dream every creative person has—to paint, to make music, and in her case, to write. Luxuries like clothes and restaurants be damned. In the spirit of solidarity still clinging to me from the benefit last night, I accompanied her on her rounds with her two favorite canines. The fall weather was beautiful—crisp and just beginning to blush with color—and she confessed some disappointment in bothering to watch the telecast in Washington D.C., invariably wasting three hours of time that could have been better spent.

We returned to find we had missed Tony Bennett’s performance. Now that was a disappointment.

“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.” Charles Bukowski

CUPCAKE CRUMBS

IN HER YOUNGER DAYS: FROM MY JOURNALS, 28 February 1976

I think i’m coming back again. have felt so awfully close to losing myself these past months. even now i hope i’m not lying to myself about straightening out. This afternoon i ran suddenly, after the usual late, depressive Tues. night sleep, the hour of indecision, the hungry cats & the pathetic shopping—cat food, beer & sardines (added herring to this trip. also dreamed last night i couldn’t give someone a damn 7-Up, & he died, so I bought some of that)—was about to take a shower & decided fuck it, i would run the track. the pain in my legs these past three days had been almost unbearable. Even frightened me a little. And last night, after the bourbon & the usual deadened sleep on the sofa, i thought there’s no chance. i still can’t see any light, but at least i ran, at least i’m at the studio and starting on “bleed-proof.” And tonight C. takes me to dinner & treats me well. Woke up with that dreadful stomach pain, but the running scared it away for awhile—Wrote a crazed letter to Buk the other night:

Hank, is it? Okay—it sounds okay. Only closer—i can hardly write. All of the absurdities, as well as the incidentals have been closing in & fuck Brahms, Chopin all that. Down means bourbon & Sinatra. i’m so sick of it all—sick of even trying to explain to the one person who would probably not understand, least understand? I am 28. i look 16 sometimes. i feel a hundred often. i was once in love because he liked Sinatra. i was once in love because he didn’t love me. i need a hole or a cave or arms to crawl away into but can’t because of precedent.

i love your voice. i am not of the character of Cupcakes. I am not any of those gory romantic things and even tonight destroyed the last living fingernail with bourbon gusto. I’m afraid of you and absolutely sure I’ll be my normal cynical self. i need you for a friend & i’m scared to death to ask again. i love your poetry. factotum bored me. tomorrow i’ll most likely be fired from job. tonight i thought of a title for a new canvas—“Bleed-Proof”—orig? eh? there’s this poet here.—young—full of Yeats—and our paths cross constantly & he can’t relate to a yellow legal pad so what the hell kind of poet can he be?

But i did come up with a title tonight! something! tomorrow i’ll write you a sober & full of youthful convictions letter. tonight I’m a hundred years old—drunk, aching—a little hungry. do you mind awfully if i don’t measure up to this C.Cakes O’Brien person?

(written the night of the G. horror & seeing S. again)

Lent Jack London $78ºº tues jan 27—(paid for his back rent—evicted the night before)

now, even now the confusion works so hard at taking over.

PHOTOPGRAPH ABOVE: PHOTOGRAPHER UNKOWN