(MRR 349) June 2012 Mykel & Rush Together!

You're Wrong

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

“Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuses of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.” – Charles Bradlaugh

[NOTE: Because of the delay between writing and publishing... and because of the (especially American) shortness of memory... the circumstances of this column will probably be forgotten by the time you read it. Even if you don't remember the case... I hope you get the point.]

It was more embarrassing than a hard-on at a lesbian bar. Right there, in the little ads section on the right-hand side of my Facebook page... among the ads specially chosen for me... mixed in with (my favorite) FIND GIRLS WHO LIKE TO DRINK promotion... an ad sponsored by the lefty phone company Credo: Tell Rush Limbaugh's advertisers: Stop supporting attacks on women. It says. 

 

Not being a regular Rush listener, I don't even know that he said anything special until I see this ad. The only way liberals hear about Limbaugh's spew is through fanatical media monitors... guys and gals who listen to everything from the other side... then get outraged by it... professional outragers... call in the protest wagon!

 

The right-wing has a slew of these I'm-telling-on-you spies. They monitor every TV and radio channel, every website... record everything. They urge boycotts for anything that supports homotude or questions Christianity. Pro-Israelis also have a slew of these fanatics. They urge boycotts for anything nice to Muslims.

 

Example: when All-American Muslim premiered on The Learning Channel, pressure from the pro-Israel right forced the Lowe's company to drop its ads for that show.

The right-wing Florida Family Association, also pushing advertisers to drop that program, cheered Lowe's decision. The rest of us felt a little ashamed.

Remember Janet Jackson's tit? Hooey, what an outrage. A nipple (and I think the nipple was covered) on TV! Oh no! Boycott that girl!

And The Dixie Chicks... saying something nasty about GW Bush Jr.? Horrible! Boycott them too.

Go to yourchristianspace.com. You'll find a list of “companies that support gay rights,” and suggestions to boycott them...NOW! Before it's too late!

If, in our society, the way ideas can reach the masses is through the support of corporations... and the reaction to any idea we don't like is to boycott those corporate supporters... The corporate world will just stop taking risks... stop supporting ANYTHING that people may not like. The range of ideas will shrink. There'll be nothing but THE FOOD CHANNEL, and JERSEY SHORE. I expect there are people who want to boycott those too.

Listen buckaroos, the antidote to speech you don't like is not to ban it, but to answer it with speech you DO like. When Rush Limbaugh caved in and apologized for calling this Catholic college student “a slut,” Michael Moore tweeted this:

 

Rush-- as soon as you started losing the big $$ from your hate speech you caved and obeyed the men who pay u. Who's the prostitute now, bitch?

 

Go Michael! That's the way to answer the bully pulpit. Don't ban 'em. Yell back at 'em!

 

As of this writing 50 companies pulled their ads from the show. Two stations WBEC in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and KPUA in Hilo, Hawaii stopped carrying the show.

 

Flash to a Korean bar in midtown NYC: I'm with April, one of my colored pals.

 

[Note to new readers: I don't get along with white people... especially white Americans. There are some okay ones, I'll admit. I've even met some... but as a group, they give me the creeps. Usually, it goes without saying that I'm with someone of some kind of color... yellow... brown... black... red...but here it's important, so I mention it. You'll see why.]

 

We talk about Rush Limbaugh.

 

“Sure,” April say, “let him say what he wants about us... about Obama... “the welfare cheats”... everybody knows he's talking about this,” she points to her brown arm, “but does anyone complain? Naw, no one complains...no boycotts”

 

I raise my eyebrows, signaling her to continue.

 

She does, “But let him insult one white girl and POW!! The shit hits the central air conditioning.”

 

“So you agree with me on this free speech stuff?” I ask.

“I don't give a shit about that,” she says. “What pisses me off is that there's plenty of white women in the 1% and not plenty of African Americans... Colored people to you, Mykel... That fat white guy can say what he wants about US... no boycotts... no demands to take him off the air. But let him insult the purity of one white girl and..”

 

She snaps her fingers that way that colored girls have of snapping their fingers... making a large Z in the air, and adding a swish of the shoulder... You could just die watching it!

 

She continues, “you've got Michael Moore tweeting and the president calling her up.... One white girl... Pisses me off.”

 

Wow! There's a point of view I hadn't even considered. Up to now it seemed just a question of free speech. Give the widest birth to the widest number of ideas. Now we've got class war... or race war... or something. Hmmmm.

 

Flash back to now: April was right, of course. The Republican War on Women has been the biggest vote getter for the Democrats. Not their war on the poor... their war on Muslims...their war on colored people... their war on the 99%... Nope, people with money can't get behind those things. But a WAR ON WOMEN... that's something Ms.... and Mr. Middleclass can be proud to fight against.

 

It only confirms what I started out saying. That is, we need the widest possible variety of viewpoints in the media. We need the broadest representation of politics and of people.

 

Instead of kicking Rush off the air, we should be demanding shows for Muslims. Instead of boycotting Rush's sponsors, we should be urging them to ALSO sponsor THE NEGRO HOUR, ANARCHY AT NOON and MEXICANS TAKE IT BACK. We need MORE opinions, not fewer.

Did you know there was a gay Muslim/Arab organization? Did you know there is a Black Agenda Radio program? They don't have shows on major stations. AOL never supported them, let alone pulled out. Fans of their shows probably don't have enough money to make even the minimum for a Capital One account, let alone threaten a boycott. (Capital One, like AOL, ditched Limbaugh.)

Facebook hosts Somos el 99%, a Hispanic group supporting the struggling barrel bottom. That's it... just a page on Facebook. Where's their corporate sponsorship? Hello Fubu?

 

How come you never heard of these groups? How come you're not out there demanding a spot for them... on Fox, perhaps?

 

I'll tell you why. You're too busy protesting Rush. You're too busy worrying about how to LIMIT speech instead of expanding it for EVERYONE.

 

In Europe, most countries have a strong government-supported PUBLIC broadcasting system. This guarantees free speech across a wide spectrum of speakers. There is no tyranny of the market place on these stations. Marketplace be damned. But in the US, even the weak “Public” Broadcasting System is beholden to corporations to make ends meet. Anything they do is subject to the power of consumers... and their manipulators.

 

Am I against all boycotts?

 

Of course not. If a store sells sweatshop clothes... or a cellphone maker uses exploitation factories... or a restaurant steals tips... or a farm or a factory exposes its workers to dangerous chemicals... I say, yeah! Boycott! But the boycott is a tool... like a hammer. You can use it to pound in a nail... or to hit someone over the head. Boycotts attacking speech are hitting someone over the head. You may enjoy seeing it... until the head that's hit is yours.

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->It's about time dept: Awhile ago, I wrote a column talking about how it's time to leave Hitler behind. How Hitler has become a meme, a cliché, and is used to justify the most horrible and inane actions.

              We can lock the Palestinians in ghettos... because of Hitler. Hitler was a vegetarian so you shouldn't be. We see pictures of Obama as Hitler on Tea Party posters. My Israeli pal, Nadav, tells me the left in Israel dresses up Prime Ministers in gestapo uniforms-- with little mustaches-- to complain about them.

          ENOUGH ALREADY! Let's move on.

         Hitler has been dead for longer than 80% of the world has been alive. Get over it! That's what I said in the column.

Recently, I saw a different way that we could kill Hitler once-and-for-all. Make him CAMP... like Che Guevara. That's the second best solution (after just forgetting him, or relegating him to the past... like Attila the Hun).

    CAMP is what's going on in Thailand. Colonel Sanders with a mustache and comb-over. Hello Kitty... Mickey Mouse with just-under-the-nose-mustaches. It's so extreme. I love it. It makes the guy FUNNY... KITCH... IMPOTENT. I'll take that over a Hitler-faced Obama (or Netanyahu)any day.

-->Could be good-bye dept: I started writing this before my African trip. I emailed it in from France. Right now there are riots in Senegal, exactly where I'll be going. There's always a chance I won't make it back. Up until the point of my demise, in any case, you can read my travel adventures at: http://mykelsdiary.blogspot.com/

               By the way, how much do you hear about Africa on TV in America? Fox... or CNN? Only if it affects “our” interests, then we hear something. Could we have some free speech about Chad? Don't get me started.

-->Happened again dept: The Indiana Star reports that an anti-gay Republican representative, Phillip Hinkle, arranged to pay an 18-year old guy $140 for "a really good time" at an Indianapolis hotel. The two met on Craigslist, and Hinkle "exposed himself" to the guy. The politician has decided not to run for reelection.

Actually, the most disturbing thing about this is how The Indiana Star found the emails that set it up. They seem to be e-spying like in the Murdock papers. Nobody on the left is complaining though. They like the scandal too much... as long as it's THEM, not US. Fuck the rights of the accused. Right? He's on the OTHER side anyway.

-->Try it with the crescent and star dept: The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles has approved a license plate with three crosses and the words "One State Under God." on it. Somehow, the locals say, it's a free speech issue, though this is THE STATE speaking, not some individual like Rush Limbaugh.

           I hope others: Satanists and Muslims for starters... demand their own license plates. We'll see how far they get.

-->Tossing out the bad Apple? dept: For the past few months I've been ranting against the fashion that is Apple. Why hit it when so many other targets (like Wal-Mart) are so much easier, and maybe nastier?

     The answer, of course, is that the readers of this zine are likely to use Apple products and support all the associated evil. Now, it turns out, Apple might get Obama reelected. (Me? I'm voting for the GREEN PARTY ticket!)

      The Wall Street Journal reports that the recent economic upturn-- and fine future projections-- are lies, distorted by Apple.

      Says the Journal, Fourth-quarter earnings in the S&P 500 are up over 6.6 percent from the previous year. But if Apple's earnings are bracketed out, the gains shrivel to just 2.8 percent.

     If Obama wins on “the economy”... Apple did that too!

-->Isn't Google a good company-- just like Apple dept: This Week Magazine reports that Google has been bypassing privacy settings to track the web habits of people using Apple's Safari browser. Google put cookies on the phones and computers of users, even if they said they don't want to be tracked.

           Google says it has halted the practice, but Microsoft charged that Google also circumvented privacy controls on their Internet Explorer... and still does.

-->Tough one to call dept: Church and State Magazine reports Oregon's ban on teachers wearing religious dress has been repealed. Civil rights groups had been fighting against the law, stating that it “denies equal employment opportunity to religious minorities.” Christian crosses have long been allowed, but headscarves and turbans were banned. Sounds like a victory for free religious speech, right?

        Hold on: The problem is that the law's repeal could allow teachers to claim any attire as part of their religious exercise, including proselytizing pins and t-shirts. That could be a serious violation of church-state separation, and a toe in the door to allow teachers to preach to students.

        I donno about this one, though I'm inclined to say, fuck it. If teachers want, they can wear their What would Jesus do? pins. BUT, students have to be allowed to wear their equally religious What would GG do? pins in reply.

--end-

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=17388657#editor/target=post;postID=7326200588755193448

(MRR 348) May 2012 Mykel vs Atheists & Other Critics

You're Wrong

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

"God did not create man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way around.” Christopher Hitchens

I'm madder than a Republican with anal warts. I should be happy. Hatemail again... after such a long dry period. I'm no longer preaching to choir... or maybe I am, but they're sure as shit a choir in a different church.

One letter was absolutely correct about my error in crediting my half-hero, Ron Paul, with something he didn't write. One letter looked as if the author googled my name with “pedophile” and used all the results to incriminate me. Jezus fuckin' Christ.

Ok, I tried it. I googled the combination of Millard Fillmore and pedophilia. The results?

About 10,500 results (0.38 seconds)

Try it yourself... from home... not the library. Though with the way Google is, YOUR inquiry will probably match YOU with both Millard Fillmore and pedophilia when someone else asks.

With Rick Santorum complaining that Obama is not governing “by biblical principles.” And this from Newt Gingrich:

I have two grandchildren. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they'll be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists.

It's clear that Americans live on the dark side of the moon of idiocy. Of course, those politicians may not be as stupid as their quotes, but THEY are preaching to the choir.

I just finished reading a book called GOD IS NOT GREAT, HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING. It's by anti-abortion atheist Christopher Hitchens. As a pro-abortion non-atheist, I expected to disagree with a lot of what Hitchens had to say. I didn't expect, however, how useful his book would be in providing examples for this column.

So, now Brothers and Sisters. I want you to stop reading for a bit. Close your eyes. Get down on your knees. Feel the power coursing through your veins. It's the power of MYKEL. Imagine the touch of MYKEL on your forehead. Feel the love of MYKEL. Listen to the song of MYKEL as he preaches to the unpreached. MYKEL telling it to the congregation. MYKEL preaching to you on HOW NOT TO THINK.

Take the quote at the beginning of this column. What it means is: 1. God did not create human beings. 2. Human beings created God.

Okay, then add the idea God does not exist... and BINGO! LOGICAL INCONSISTANCY. Our first way NOT to think.

If human beings created God, then God MUST exist. It is not possible to create something if that thing does not exist. That should be as plain as the wart on your anus created by anal intercourse. An argument based on the non-existence of something you say was CREATED is a non-argument. It contradicts itself. Get it brothers and sisters?

Flash to a dark empty stage... a single spotlight focuses on a wooden stool.... the sound of footsteps... a man enters the spotlight. He wears a dark suit, a black cape with bright red lining, and a top hat. He bows to the audience, removes his top hat and sets it-- upside down-- on the stool.

“Thank you ladies and gentlemen,” says the man, “I know magicians are supposed to pull rabbits out of top hats...” he gestures to the top hat with his left hand.

While the audience looks at the hat, his right hand quietly reaches under his cape‚ “but this hat is empty today.” He holds up the hat in his left hand to show the audience it is empty. This action hides his right hand that now grasps something.

“Instead,” he continues, “I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having a hare up my nose.”

He drops the hat onto the stool and puts his right hand to his nose releasing a rubber rabbit. He holds it high. The audience laughs. It's call magic. And it's called misdirection.

Look over there! And while you're looking, the author pulls a fast one. In Hitchen's case, he writes: Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as a negation.

It's clear Hitchen means that religion (especially Islam) cannot make anything on its own, but can only destroy what was made in the secular society. By implication (misdirection), the World Trade Center Attacks were MUSLIM attacks. The reason was religion... a fanatical Jihad.

Bullshit.

Logic says this attack was NOT religiously motivated. If it were, why not Big Ben or some synagogue in Des Moines for fuck's sake? The World Trade Center is a symbol of American TRADE, business... not religion.

If someone attacks your people, kills your leaders, invades your country, you don't need religion to tell you to fight back. The US has destroyed the middle-East for OIL. MILLIONS of people have been killed, either directly by the US, or by US financed troops that later find themselves killed by other US financed troops.

The pilots who flew into the Twin Towers could've been Zoroastrian for all that mattered. 

Hitchens, like the American right, and the pro-Israel everybody else, made a political attack into a religious attack. It's a trap, and if you fall into it, you'll be a victim of MISDIRECTION.

I don't remember it exactly, but in college I saw the play Cyrano de Bergerac. I remember that Cyrano was supposed to be some kind of intellectual who had great ideas and a big nose. When people didn't like what he said, but were unable to come up with an adequate objection, they made fun of his nose. Maybe I got it wrong, but it doesn't matter. What's important is the idea.

That's called AD HOMINIM. It means “if you can't attack the idea, attack the person.” I write a column complaining that people are more concerned about a football coach accused of a non-lethal crime than they are about Apple making iPhones at companies with such bad conditions people have committed documented suicide... REAL DEAD PEOPLE. Two letter-writers attacked me, personally, with only the briefest mention of the IDEAS in the column, and nothing refuting them.

And Hitchens?

We now know Pope Pius XII composed the following letter to Berlin: To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich!... We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people... May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God's help, to fruition!

What's it mean? CATHOLOCISM IS BAD. Why? Because one pope writes a nice letter to Hitler. That is ad hominin... a kind of misdirection and it's a way you should NOT think.

NOW try this one from Hitchens: Pythagoras refuted astrology by the simple means of pointing out that identical twins do not share that the same future.

While I don't believe in astrology, I know even identical twins are not born at exactly the same time and would therefore have different “charts.” I also know that no astrologer believes your life is determined 100%... down to the smallest anal wart... by the stars. There are still other influences-- or free will. It's SCIENCE that's trying to do away with free will (the gay gene, the alcoholic gene, the obnoxious personality gene)-- not religion.

Hitchen sites an expert and POOF, it's true... NOT!

Type “Experts Agree” into Google and among the 10,300,000 results you'll find these things they agree on:

Experts Agree With Ron Paul’s Controversial Foreign Policy

Experts agree biodiesel must be part of a sustainable society

Romney Vs Paul: Experts Agree GOP Contest Now A Two Horse Race

Experts agree: Pack's Aaron is simply amazing

Winter forecasts vary, but experts agree it'll be wet and stormy

Experts Agree This Is The Most Effective Diet In The World

Experts agree - Sugar is a health destroyer

Experts Agree: Cindy Crawford’s 10-Year-Old Daughter Is Genetic Perfection

Experts Agree anti-gay texts of major faiths taken out of context

Get it? If you want to convince people without actually having facts, just make it up and put it in AN EXPERT's mouth. Better, a bunch of experts... all agreeing (with you).

You can be vaguer. Try EVERYBODY KNOWS... or IT'S COMMON KNOWLEDGE THAT...

There's even a linguistic trick called the agentless passive that does the same thing.

[Aside] A brief intro to Grammar 101:

Active: Natalie Portman thinks Mykel's penis tastes like licorice.

Passive: Mykel's penis is thought by Natalie Portman to taste like licorice.

In the active sentence Natalie Portman is the subject. In the passive sentence, the subject is Mykel's penis. The agent, however, (the one who does the tasting) in both sentences is Natalie Portman.

I can use a passive with no agent. Mykel's penis is thought to taste like licorice. That way, I don't have to say who actually did the tasting... the reader has to guess. [End of aside]

From Hitchens: As a materialist, I think it has been demonstrated that an embryo is a separate body and entity, and not merely a growth on or in the female body.... the words "unborn child" describe a material reality.

Who demonstrated it? Who gets to call a sliver of barely more than a snotball an unborn child? The agentless passive answers those question... but it shouldn't. And it's a way you should NOT think.

Ok, Brothers and Sisters, that's enough for today's sermon. I'm not sure if next month's column will be written from New York or Gibraltar. Probably the latter. The one after that: AFRICA. Yes MUSLIM AFRICA. You wanna make somethin' of it?

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->Right again dept: After the WTC attacks, Ron Paul spoke about how the US itself, caused the attacks. Not in some stupid conspiracy-theory way, but because of how the US is viewed by other countries in the world. Read the text of his speech at: tinyurl.com/RonPaulon9-11.

-->King Bloomberg dept: NY Mayor Bloomberg said in a speech at MIT that "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world." A private army for the mayor. Occupy that!

-->Pay to Play dept: Supervisors of Riverside County California voted for a bill that would force jail inmates to repay the country for the costs of jailing them. Supervisor Jeff Stone, who introduced the measure, called the jails "prison hotels."

-->Sid Yiddish sent me this note from the IRS:

You can treat your child as meeting the residency test even if the child has been kidnapped, but both of the following statements must be true. The child is presumed by law enforcement authorities to have been kidnapped by someone who is not a member of your family or the child's family.

      In the year the kidnapping occurred, the child must have lived with you for more than half of the part of the year before the date of the kidnapping. 

Now that's what I call compassion!

-->Website magazine reports that email spam in November 2011 was the lowest in three years. Only 70 percent. I guess most folks are like me and only read our Facebook mail, deleting everything else. So spam killed email and now it's killing itself.

-->Arizona does it again dept: Sorry Sid, but that is one fucked up state. This time, five Arizona Republican state senators have introduced a law that prohibits teachers from talking about anything that would not get past the FCC.

     The law not only cripples the ability to teach about sexuality and other non-Victorian topics, but it also puts teachers in jeopardy for teaching The Canterbury Tales, The Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, and probably every work by an obscure English writer named William Shakespeare.

      But the bill goes further. Because the language in the bill doesn’t distinguish between public speech or conduct and just plain old every day speech or conduct, the law could require schools to fire teachers who use profanity and have sex in their private lives away from school. 

     With the Republicans continued attacks on teachers and schools, and the guaranteed lowering of educational levels... they guarantee a society of ignoramuses! Exactly the people who will be voting Republican! 

--end--

you can find Mykel's African adventures at: www.mykelsdiary.blogspot.com

(MRR 347) April 2012 Column... True Punks!

You're Wrong

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

"You can tell how punk somebody is by how often they go to the post office.” --Kyle Nooneman

“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” --William Blake

Almost every month, I complain about the internet. Perhaps, though, like Blake's grain of sand, the world is contained somewhere in anything, even Facebook. Right now, I'm reading the Facebook group Old School Hardcore Kids. It starts me on the path to this column. Let's look at what it says.

From one post to another, when it's not YouTube videos of Agnostic Front, it's debate about what's real hardcore. On Facebook and in this zine... One month after the next... Letters columns and reviews... some debate rages... if not hardcore... at least punk. What is it? Who is it? And most importantly, who it is NOT? This column will settle that.

First... as you know from the myriad of editorials, letters to the editor, interview comments... if you allow your song to be used on anything that has corporate connections. IT'S NOT HARDCORE.

THE SCENE: Tom Vomit is in a crisis. He's been offered a job as a designer in the mega-evil ad agency, AD BOOSTERS. Tons of cash. The only problem: he has to make an ad for Walmart, the most evil corp of corpAmerica. He has one way out.

His band, the Decolators, has a song that Toyota wants. If he sells the rights to that song, he and his bandmates can live from the royalties. He won't have to take a job whoring himself to the corporatocracy. He can live from his music... his dream since he was a 14 year old punk rocker listening to Green Day. Music or evil corporate hell? What does he choose? He chooses music...and gets thrown out of the punkrock club because of it.

Get it Tom? It wouldn't matter if you got nothing from the song or if it's a benefit to save French anarchist bombers from the guillotine. If it's got a corporate logo^TM on it, it ain't punk-- and neither are you!

Of course, that doesn't go far enough. No matter how macho, shirtless, ripped the picture on the cover is, if the music is poppy, danceable (rather than moshable), or if it makes you smile and not grit your teeth and clench your fist. IT'S NOT HARDCORE!

 THERE'S MORE: no matter how nasty it sounds, if the musicians look like dorks... if the singer has glasses... or the cover shows a bunch of cute guys in Hawaiian shirts and porkpie hats... IT IS SOFT! IT IS NOT HARDCORE!

FLASHBACK. It's 1986: I'm in Bleecker Bob's... fishing through the cheap punk bin. At the next milk crate is Fairly Mulligan, bass player for the hardest band in New York: THE NEANDERTHALS. I pull a record from the case and show it to him. It's from 1982, a band called The Ancestors. I heard a lot about them, but never actually HEARD them. On the cover is a drawing of a guy in glasses wearing a tie. The name of the LP is FILO GOES FOR AN MBA. I show it to Fairly.

“Waddaya thinka this?” I ask him. “I heard of 'em but I don't know 'em.”

Fairly looks at the LP and just about spits.

“It's shit!” he says. “You can't be HARDcore and wear glasses.... and a fuckin' tie? Are you kidding? Somebody should kill that guy.”

I put the record back.

Flash ahead to 1993: It's GG's notorious last show, at the Gas Station in New York. Everybody knows about it. The chaos, the shit-slinging, the fatal aftermath. But what everybody DOESN'T know is what happened AFTER the show... at THE MARS BAR (RIP).

The scummiest bar in New York. It somehow managed to last well into this century. I've been there with Ivan Merma and Gilberto... post WTC.

In 1993, you took your life... or at least your balls... in your hand when you went into the place. Several of us refugees from the GG show go there to have a few drinks to recover from what we saw.

I walk into the bathroom. enter a stall, sit on the toilet and remove GG's shit from my jacket. I use the corner of my wallet to scrape. Then I wrap each stinky brown piece in a paper napkin. My plan is to sell the wrapped GG shit for $5... in front of CBs at the next hardcore matinee.

As I scrape, the door thumps. At first, I think someone's knocking to get in, but the door doesn't lock... just open it and come on in. Then there are more thumps, on the door... outside... everywhere. Only one thing sounds like breaking wood. That is breaking wood. I hear that sound. I also hear some groans... some “motherfucker!” Gunshots do not come, but they wouldn't surprise me.

A lull in the smashing, bashing, breaking, crashing, tumbling... I push the door open... slightly... The bar looks like the aftermath of a mafia hit. The back mirror is shattered... shards hang at odd angles... most of it on the floor and bartop. Not one stool is vertical... few are in one piece. On the floor, from my vantage point, I see the leather clad arm of someone whose body I can't see... the hand holds a half-shattered bottle of Olde English 800. Blood puddles on the floor under that hand.

I stick my head out a littler further. There on the bartop, in a grey hooded sweatshirt, unzipped, is K Rappo, singer for one of the hardest bands in NY: YOUNG PEOPLE NOW.

“Them walls are broke down, huh?” he says when he sees me crawling out of the bathroom.

“Waddaya mean?” I ask.

“GG ain't so tough,” he answers. “He says DRINK, FIGHT, AND FUCK? Hah, he's got it wrong. Hardcore is not about drinking or fucking. It's THE FIGHT. Listen, Mykel, get this straight. YOU ARE NOT HARDCORE IF YOU DON'T FIGHT.”

FLASH AHEAD A WEEK: THE NEADERTHALS are playing A7. They've broken up and gotten back together more times than a Hollywood couple. Great show, but that's not the important point. AFTER the show, I see Fairly Mulligan in the corner, breathing hard... showing off his chest. He spots me and waves.

“Hey Mykel,” he says. “I got something for you.”

Grabbing my hand, he pulls me into the A7 bathroom.

Now, I've been thirsting for his glutei maximi since I first saw him as a drummer for The Motivaters in 1980. Is he finally going to give up that anal hymen? My hopes rise like my penis when he pushes open a stall door. But then something strange happens.

Instead of dropping trou and bending over, he pushes on the back wall of the stall. It moves and we enter a secret room. 

It's dark. Before my eyes adjust I see nothing. A sound comes through the blackness... like a muffled pigeon chirp... or the struggling screams of someone whose mouth is duct-taped shut. Bingo!

As my eyes adjust, I make out a platform in the middle of the dark room. Tied down to that platform-- a limb stretched toward each corner-- is what looks like a naked white boy wearing black-rimmed glasses. It IS a naked white boy wearing black-rimmed glasses. It's Filo Zuckerman, singer from The Ancestors.

“See him?” asks Fairly... as if I could miss him. “He thinks he's hardcore. No tattoos and the songs? Titles like You're the One, and Silly Girl. Nothing about UNITY or THE CREW or AMERICA. Just love songs... and he calls himself hardcore?”

Something glints in Fairly's hand. I just see a faint flash before I realize that it's a pocket switchblade now plunged into the chest of the boy on the platform. It must have hit a vein, because blood spurts like a geyser... covering Fairly's face and chest.

Stabbing is not enough. Fairly slices downward and then flings the knife aside. With both hands he reaches into the slit and pulls out Filo's still beating heart. I can barely keep from fainting at the gore. Fairly leans over the pulsating cardiac, I watch him take a deep bite. It seems to explode as the blood-engorged organ spews red everywhere.

Chewing, then swallowing, Fairly looks at me. His face covered in blood like a kid's face... covered in blueberries after a pie-eating contest, Fairly looks at me and smiles.

“Mykel,” he says. “You're not HARDCORE until you've eaten human flesh.”

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog viewers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->Apology dept: I don't answer letters in the letter section. That section belongs to the readers. I have this column. It's not fair if I have the last word both places. Here, I want to answer a letter and to apologize for an error. I quoted Ron Paul on Muammar Qhaddaffi. Though the quote was from the Ron Paul website, Ron did not actually write it. I missed that. Still, written by RP or not, the quote is correct in its analysis of why that great Libyan was killed.

-->Oh that again dept: Another letter was about my column comparing a coach's sex with some kids to Apple/Steve Job's exploitation of thousands of Chinese workers, including several who committed suicides because they couldn't take the pressure. I asked why the former got all the press and attention while the latter was clearly more evil.

      The MRR letter ONLY attacked my “belief that there is nothing wrong with a 50 year old man having sex with an 10 year old boy.” It made no mention of the Apple-caused deaths. I guess it proved my point.

-->It's not as bad as you thought dept: This Week Magazine reports that the break of the “housing bubble” is not what it seems. While homes valued under $1 million have fallen an average of 1.5 percent in value over the last year, fear not. Homes valued over $1 million dollars have risen 0.7 percent in the same time.

  Says real estate economist Stan Humphries, “Luxury is the best-performing segment of the housing market right now.”

-->But they can watch us dept: The Freeman website reports that: In at least three states (Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland), it is now illegal to record an on-duty police officer even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

     The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not.) In practice this exception is not being recognized.

-->Anarchy in Bloomingdales dept: Anarchist News Dot Org reports that the Axe perfume company is making a new fragrance. You guessed it Anarchy Perfume. (Does it smell like tear gas?) One of the commercials for it is: A female police officer chases a masked jewelry thief through a sun-drenched cityscape. Sprinting, he pulls off his mask, sheds his jacket and dumps his bag of loot; she throws off her police hat, undoes her utility belt and drops her weapons to the ground. She’s no longer a cop; he’s no longer a criminal. They stare at each other with unbridled desire. The words “Nothing will ever be the same again” appear on the screen, followed by the warning “Anarchy is coming.”

Can Eau d'Punk be far behind?

--> If it takes the blood of one Christian boy to make 40 matzohs, how many matzos can you make from 143 Christian boys dept: Kyle Nooneman, whose quote starts this column, sent me this from the Huffington Post:

Parents of students at Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Norcross, Ga., are outraged at the school district's using examples of slavery in math word problems, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

    The word problems in question include references to slavery and "beatings." 

   Here are some examples:

   "Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how many would each slave pick?" and 

   "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?"

-->I wish he were right dept: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie attacked President Obama as encouraging a nation that “places comfortable lies ahead of difficult truths” and a person who is trying to “divide the country by demonizing the wealthy.” If only it were true! The wealthy ARE demons. Much more than Muslims or non-working people or old people that the Republicans are trying to demonize. Obama, unfortunately, could never be so good as to demonize the right people.

-->That's so ghetto dept: Kyle also sent me this one about Microsoft. They makes this mapping app to keep drivers out of dangerous neighborhoods. In modern American cities, this means places where there are a lot of Negroes or Hispanics.

Since most urban crime is between people who know each other and not random drivers, one critic of the app suggests:

A more useful app would be for young black men to be able to map blocks with the highest risks of their being pulled over or stopped on the street by police," he said. "That phenomenon affects many more people than the rare occurrences of random violence against motorists driving through 'bad' neighborhoods."

I say, yeah, but the guys being pulled over by the cops usually can't afford iPhones to use the app on... unless they steal them.

-end-