The Hood and the Quiz Show

Clogblog - From the hood: Marlena, the new Black Lab neighbor-- all the best traits of the breed, seems 2 me, and brains, too--loves cats, which is good, because we always have a cat or 3, and Ellie has coddled several of our cats past 20 yrs. They get slow, and Marlena’s young and fast. She’s also a normal dog and the “Loves Cats” entry on her C.V. is because she has been friends with cats b4. Dudden mean she won’t chase a non-friend; dudden mean we know what she’d do when she caught him. “Him” is Henry, our retainer, our hood's serial-killer (of gopher hordes), our knight. He’s getting up there, and he’s all bony (though he eats like a horse, and we’ve wormed him). Marlena’s already chased Hank, and he’s already eluded her. He’s not losing his clean-livin’ physical edge, and there’s plenty of cover for him to vanish into, but i can’t be sure he won’t delay, fatally. He’s getting cantankerous. I saw him send a vixen fox crawling back under the front gate. (She crawled in. He sauntered out of the bushes, and up to her, gave her a couple of swipes on the schnozz; she sat back for a moment, was seriously taken aback for a moment and then took his needle-sharp suggestion w/o further ado.) He was totally right. Ellie & I loved watching her and, for a few months, her kits, but she killed my chickens, more than once, and she’d kill a cat, i do not doubt, if she thought she could w/o great risk. So anyway here’s Henry and Marlena, so i borrowed her and brought her over, on a leash, for a visit. I let her and 2 cats stare intently at each other, telling her no, letting the leash go slack, waving the flat of my hand in front of her face—stay!—all that. Then I took her home. Everybody "got it," but that doesn’t guarantee anything at all, not yet. Stay tuned.

Whaddaya mean, “stay tuned”? You know what time it is on the east coast? Yes, i do. I’m from there, but nobody’s reading this but me and whover i send it to. It’s new, and so am i, to this. If you’re reading this in the future, archivally, so addicted to the clogblog UR, then it doesn’t matter what time it is. (For the record, it’s 7:12 P.M., PDT; 09/13/11.) I swear to u, when the number of real-time visitors reaches a million, i’ll change my daily pattern—well, not “swear,” maybe, but maybe i will. It’s highly possible.

So this is what I was going to write about today…:

The Great American Quadrennial Horse’s Ass Quiz

We're entering now the main gate to our beloved quadrennial game show, “Which Horse's Ass Do You Like Best?” The winner of the asses in the pack gets what could be the most important job and highest honor on earth but is instead the world's Disappointer-In-Chief, Con Artist of the Developed World, Premier Stooge of the Oligarchs, and many other heraldic titles.

In the current line-up of mediocreheroes there's the dynamic Rick Perry, the definitive answer to “Where's the beef?”. If this electorate decides that's the big question, Perry's a shoo-in. The governor of Texas, he has signed off on more state killings—the formal, countable, official kind—than any leader in American history. What more can I say? This is the Man for our Times!

…and I was into this subject, which will morph into another one, from the particular to the general (there’s a name for that), but now my flame’s guttering. I’ll tick off all the candidates 2 date, as Paul Simon sings, but it’s 7:30. I have real-world responsibilities unmet.  Hasta mañana. (And it was 12:04 A.M. today when I noticed I hadn’t hit the Send button.) 

OUTERNET - The Clogg Blog

The morning after: The "or-else" projects at lower Manhattan's former World Trade Center didn't make their deadlines of 9/11's Tenth Anniversary yesterday.

This entire redevelopment exercise has been dogged from its fiery beginning. The celebrated unity of New Yorkers and Americans has not been on display in the pit itself and the surrounding meeting rooms. It seems Obama's Curse, unimaginably successful so far, is still exerting its power. This is touched on rhetorically, now and then, but seldom analytically.

Competing interests and opinions stalled the work for the basest kinds of reasons: money and "turf" among them, and the sort-of-almost-finished fraction of the job, the memorial pools, are symbols, their designer says, of the absence of everything and everybody lost. This could be an artful statement in a purer context, but the prize value of that piece of solid-platinum real estate mobilized much of what brought on the attacks--naked greed and the decisive power of money, rank and status--the very polluting qualities of Capitalism that earned us our "Great Satan" sobriquet among the hot-tempered hosts of Islam and Arabia. They make the imposing young architect's characterization of his vision hideously ironic, instead.

Nineteen guys dared the enticements of said Great Satan, the risks of a desperate mission and the certainty of violent death for themselves and others in order to prove our vulnerability by striking our greatest imperial symbols. If you believe in spirits, you'd be tempted to say they favored this mission. It succeeded. Osama's men did indeed break our symbols and animate our belligerence to an extent that broke our bank, too--way more than Al Qaeda's Lincoln-figure leader could have hoped.

It was a crime, plain and simple, whatever claims for justice it was wrapped in. A few people said so immediately. Our Central Intelligence Agency, among others, treated it that way. In a brilliant military-intelligence-and-foreign-recruitment operation worthy of the all-time best, they went after the perpetrators and their headquarters in Afghanistan and, with only a few hundred damn good American men at the head of a larger, quickly assembled Afghan force, routed them, fast. It was an extra-legal search-and-destroy assignment, at a time that called for scrupulous attention to lawfulness, but it was effective and, in the atavistic, pre-legal, predominant part of the human mind, it was appropriate, and respect must be paid.

After that, it was all Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co., abetted by other lunatic neocons, urged on by longstanding cravings to attack Iraq, on any pretext, for revenge and oil, and the resulting chain of crimes on a scale that dwarfed 9/11, this time in my name and yours as citizens of the United States of America, with the full faith and credit of the U.S.A., which was suitably reduced when our gangsterism in the middle east and then in Wall Street and Washington left it soiled beyond recognition, no longer fit to be called "faith" or "credit."

There was a lot of tasteful activity marking this anniversary, many observances, celebrations and remembrances that were genuinely stirring. The spunk of New York, our true capital city, and its tough, bighearted inhabitants, was rightly raised high. Among these observances were quieter lest-we-forget reports and comments that measured what we've done and what we've lost since, in all the mornings after that initially scintillating Tuesday morning.

It's a lot. We made Bin Laden's deadly plot a giant success saga. Our murder of him, also violent and lawless, also convenient in shutting his mouth before it dispensed more madness and more unacceptable truth, was reminiscent of our murder, at night, in his room, of Black Panther Fred Hampton by Chicago police.

It was too late. The evocations of piercing tragedy and stunning drama from 9/11/01 cloaked the darker facts that the rough beast of late-stage American capitalism and imperialism preceded that day, shaped it, redoubled it exponentially and slouches still toward Bethlehem.

Mitch Clogg

Mendocino, California