You're Wrong
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board
We are all our own legal system, where we feel the need and see the opportunity; apprehending, judging, dispensing and, where we can, enforcing whatever by our personal philosophy we deem legitimate. –Iain Banks
What is it with hets? I’ve been writing for years about how I don’t fall for this genetics=sexuality crap. How we’re masters of our own souls, captains of our individual destinies. But if I did believe in a genetic link, I’d say that it there must be a link between the gene which imparts the disease of heterosexuality, and the gene that imparts the disease of stupidity.
Steve is as ugly as a hairy back: fat, bad teeth, jowls that nearly touch under his chin. A het if there ever was one.
“Hey Steve,” I ask. “Wanna go in here for a drink? They serve Yeungling on tap.”
“Mykel!” he whispers. “That’s a gay bar. I don’t want to go in there. They’ll be all over me. I’ll feel, you know, uncomfortable. I believe in rights and all that, but I don’t want to go where I’m going to have a hand on my ass.”
“You’re ugly!” I don’t tell him, but should. “Being homo gives you taste. It doesn’t make you lose it. Just because guys like some other guys, it doesn’t mean they like all other guys. Jezus fuckin’ Christ. You like girls, but are you gonna try and cop a feel on Hillary Clinton?”
Steve doesn’t answer this, because I don’t really say it. We’re friends despite his stupidity. But it gets me thinking about this homo matter. It also provides me with a convenient introduction to this month’s column which, although called The Boy with The Perfect Nose, is actually about my jury duty.
The jury system could be great. It’s a chance for the average Jane to judge the relative idiocy of the laws made in her name. If she doesn’t like a law, she can vote NOT GUILTY to show her dislike of that law, or the methods used to enforce it. It is only incidentally important if the person accused, actually committed the crime. That’s small potatoes in the stew of things. But an individual voting on the entire criminal justice system? That’s a big deal! At least it should be.
But, in its never-ending efforts to make individuals powerless, the government has lied to jurors. Judges tell us that we cannot decide on the law. We can only decide the facts. Is a witness lying or telling the truth? Were they where they said they were, or somewhere else? Jury duty becomes a meaningless act, a waste of time. No wonder most people hate it. What good is it?
Every four years, I get a letter calling me to serve time on a jury. Actually, the letters come more frequently, but I only have to go once in four years. Last time was on a bribery case. I was the only hold-out. 11 guilty votes and me. Sure the guy did it. But I hated the way the government used wiretap evidence and informers. Eventually, my co-jurors brow-beat me into changing my vote. A real loss of integrity. I hated myself for it and vowed it wouldn’t happen again.
“I just tell ‘em I’m gay,” says my pal Marshall. “That gets me excused right away.”
“Isn’t that illegal discrimination?” I ask.
“Oh, they just think I’m too liberal. They always find another reason to send me packing,” he tells me.
Now I find myself in the jury waiting room, typing this very column. Thank G-d for the lack of music! But silence is not to be had. Two older women chat in front of me: The old body parts aren’t what they used to be. Isn’t it awful what some celebrity did to some other celebrity.
I try not to listen. Others here, like most of silence-hating America, have to clear their throats, cough loudly or fiddle with a newspaper. At least I can thank the Bitch Goddess that they confiscate cellphones on the way in.
There’s a library-like feel here, though the biddies in front don’t get it. From way in the back comes the buzz of another pair of chatting females. Only women talk. Men cough.
I guess there’s nothing wrong with it. It isn’t a library. No shhh signs. But somehow there doesn’t seem to be… I donno, a respect.
I notice a young blond guy with curly hair. He smiles at me… friendly type. He’s wearing some college sweatshirt, an awful salmon color with white lettering. Exactly which college never registers on my brain. I’m too busy planning what I’ll say to the judge. He’ll ask me, “Can you promise to judge the facts of the case as you see them and follow the law as I give it to you?”
“I believe in the right of jurors to vote their opinions,” I’ll say. “I believe that each individual must judge the law as well as the facts. Juries are the last protection against bad laws.”
It’s likely he’ll throw me out then. But everyone in the courtroom will have heard me. I can make more of an impression by being excused than by serving.
A big black court clerk enters and gives us an introduction and orientation—nuts and bolts—no civic duty stuff.
You must not serve if you do not live in the area covered by the Southern District Court. That is Manhattan, The Bronx, Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties. You must not serve if you have been convicted of a felony or are under indictment for a felony. You may not serve if you are over 70 years old. If you are over seventy, it is optional. If you choose to serve, we welcome your service.
So those most sympathetic to the defendant… those who know what it’s like having been convicted… they are denied the right to convict. Ah America, how do I hate you? Let me count the ways.
The clerk tells us to stand on line at the sides of the room. We then should hand in our summons and answer the question Are you ready to serve?
“Not that it matters,” he says. “Ready or not here you come.”
The guy has a good sense of humor. He seems to like performing.
With so much experience, the organization here could have been better. Why not stand a row at a time—like on an airline. Reseating provides a lucky break, though. The biddies are no longer together. It’s quiet… er.
Now there’s a movie about the jury process. Here’s where all the civic duty and thrill of the jury service come into practice. The woman in the movie—the hostess—has a very severe body. She could be anorexic. She’s in office lady drag, about 45, sharp features and hollow cheeks, white as country club.
The movie takes about ½ hour. In it, the judges are all white. There’s an Indian (turban, not feather) lawyer. The former jurors they interview are mostly white. They talk to a farmer in front of his cows. A septuagenarian former librarian is at home, in front of a bookcase. This was not made for New Yorkers.
The film stresses what I hate about the jury system: the need for ignorance. Don’t look things up. Don’t research the topic. Don’t know anything—that’s the key. It’s awful. Then, it’s over.
After the movie—nothing. Now we have real silence—except for an occasional cough—more like throat clearing—and the rustle of pages. If I concentrate, I can hear the hum of air conditioning. No music. No voices. Even the tap tap tap of my computer keyboard destroys the calm. I’ll stop. I wish I were awake enough to enjoy the quiet.
Now, it’s 10AM. I guess there’ll be one round of jury picking then, in an hour, back again for a second round… then home. Outside, it’s pouring rain.
I’m called on the first round. Part of 50, around 25% of the whole room. We line up. “I hope you brought your umbrellas,” says the guard.
We go outside, downpour, torrents, ark-building weather. We’re across the street, in the other building. Another Federal court, in the worst of all possible worlds. I’m on the panel for Grand Jury Duty. 1 MONTH OF SERVICE. How can I survive on no income for a month? $40,000 in debt. I’ll sink. I’ll never get out. I’ll have to live off eBay or something. What awful bad luck. I guess everyone in the room is thinking the same thing.
At first they pick 23 people. Then they go through them, one at a time, as each tries to get out of service.
One by one, the jurors whine to the judge. He dismisses the first three—a bad sign for the rest of us. Number four stays. Looks like the judge is getting tougher. Is being thrown out of your apartment for not paying rent a good enough excuse?
After they go through everybody (most have some excuse), they call new names to fill the vacated spots. From the 1st round, 14 of the original 23 are still stand—err… sitting.
We’re in a beautiful old building. 20 foot ceilings, recessed lighting, elegant floral design on huge ceiling tiles. It strikes me how churchlike the place is. Long pews, an altar up front, a large US Court seal where the cross would be. Even the windows are high. Though arched, they’re not quite as pointed as a church’s.
But there is something evil about this church. The District Attorney says the proceedings are secret. No one’s allowed in except the jury, the prosecutor, the defendant and his lawyer. Secret trials.
And I count the rows—the number of pews. There are six on each side. Six-Six And how many windows? Six. SIX SIX SIX It is a church. The Church of Satan. It’s right here in lower Manhattan.
But there’s no fire or brimstone. In fact, it’s ice cold. Several people have complained about the air conditioning. We’ve just come in from the pouring rain and the air conditioner is on so high the snot is freezing in our noses. The finger tips of my right hand are numb. I look at them. They’re wrinkled as if I’ve just come out of a pool. A tubercular guy in the front row coughs for real, from deep in his lungs. Jezus fuckin’ Lucifer.
Now, they’ve got 9 empty seats to fill. Where will I be? 8,7,6,5,4,3,2… I’m not in this round. But there’ll be other whiners, others excused. How can I get out of it? Book tour? Old parents? Contrary views? I don’t know. If I have to serve, I’ll be out on the street. Jury duty itself puts a crimp in my budget, but a month? I’ll die.
I should have worn an Osama bin Laden was right t-shirt. Or maybe carried that Dennis Cooper novel. You know the homo one where the guys fuck each other. Then one guy rips open the other and plunges his hands into the still warm intestines. Yeah, Dennis Cooper would keep me off a jury.
My head is pounding. My blood pressure’s way up. I can feel the mercury rising, a million over 7324. I’ll explode like that guy in Scanners. Seat number 13 has been excused 3 times. I’m going to get seat number 13. I know it. It’s jinxed. Like Apollo 13. I’ll never make it. Some mob boss will have me rubbed out… Ah, they filled it with someone else. But seat number 1, the foreman’s seat, is empty. I can’t be the foreman. The foreman has to be there every day. The guard explained that we can have a few days off. All we have to do is check with the foreman. That means the foreman has to be there. Otherwise, who do you check with? Fuck, I’m going to be the foreman.
Okay, I’ve decided to serve. I won’t complain. It’ll be an adventure. Somehow, I’ll live. It’ll be a chance to spout off to 22 other people. Tell ‘em about the real jury system. Tell ‘em how it’s their duty to vote their conscience regardless of the law. Tell ‘em that juries are—or should be-- the last protection humans have against bad laws. Everything else is just representative. You vote for someone and—they win. You never have a say personally. It’s an awful system. Here’s a chance to act on your own. A tiny sliver of real power. Seize it! Don’t like government spying? Refuse to indict if it’s used. Don’t like crimes with no victims? Drug laws? Prostitution? Refuse to indict! For this one time, you have the power. Use it.
I picture myself standing up before my fellow jurors, index finger in the air making an impassioned speech. The Patrick Henry of Pearl Street.
The score: 14 out of 23 stay.
9 out of 14
5 out of 9
2 out of 5
Not quite yet.
1 out of 2
Here it comes… I’m the last to be chosen… nope.
But wait—there’s a hitch. There are two more jurors to be chosen. This time for really long term service. Eight months. That I cannot do. I guess I’ll just be honest and say it’ll break me. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I can’t live for 2 months on no pay.
There is a tension in the room. Everyone hopes it’s someone else. Everyone hopes there’ll be no dismissals as our pool of jurors has shrunk considerable. They call one person. Not me. Then another. Oh no, the first is let off. Some lame ass excuse, I’m sure. How could the judge be so dumb as to buy that?! What a sucker. He believes this guy, but he won’t believe me. It’s just not fair.
Another name chosen. Again, not me.
Then it’s over… at least for the grand jury.
“Those of you not chosen for the grand jury will return to the jury pool,” says the judge.
“We’re free,” breathes a woman a few years younger than me. Her long blond hair frames a hippie-ish face, pretty, without make-up.
I’m sure someone will call us back. There’s been a mistake. They need one more. Will the jurors please return to the Grand Jury room? It doesn’t happen. I’m free. Sort of.
The courtroom clerk tells those of us lucky enough not to have been chosen to return to the jury pool. As we head back toward the x-ray machine a guard stops us. (Note: there has been an increase in security. In the subway yesterday, there were cops and a check table. When I passed City Hall, there were riot cops with bulletproof vests and machine guns. I guess the terror alert is up. Are we orange yet?)
I look around at the pool of jurors. There’s one older colored guy who wears a blue shirt and tie. One other white guy has a suit on, but he looks more like a salesman than a lawyer or businessman. Most of the rest of the jurors are under 40, more women than men. No one looks rich. There is one beautiful boy with a perfect nose. His brown hair curls around the lower part of his ear. But it is the nose that attracts me. Not large or fat or wide, but perfect, coming out from between his eyebrows with a strong, intentional force, then ending in a soft smooth roundness. He could be a first year college student. Maybe he’s into older men. I smile at him. He doesn’t smile back. I go to lunch.
I eat outside in the food court. I order a $5 veggie melt wrap and sit down. At the table next to me is the blond college student with the curly hair and ugly sweatshirt. He seems like a friendly guy, but I don’t have anything to say to him. He looks very non-punk, and I’m not really in making-new-friends mode. (Except maybe for the guy with the perfect nose.)
We nod hello at each other, and don’t say a word. After I finish my wrap, I get up and walk down to Nassau Street. There used to be a store there that sold cheap porno videos. Maybe I can find it.
I give the college kid a little wave as I get up. Heading toward Nassau Street it suddenly occurs to me: SECURITY. When I enter the courthouse, I’m going to have to show my bag to the security guard. Am I gonna want to explain Oriental Gash Guzzlers? I don’t think so. Maybe it’ll help keep me off a jury, but the way things are going—it might sooner rather than later—bring me in front of one. I forgo the trip and head back to the courtroom. It’s 1:30.
Lunch is officially over at 2:00. I sit in the workroom, right outside the main jury assembly room. It’s a room with library-like study cubicles. I take out my Toshiba, and type these words. At 2:30 the court clerk begins a new round of name calling. My name is third. Also chosen in this round is the college kid, and the guy with the beautiful nose. HERE! I shout from the workroom, when the clerk calls my name. I gather up my computer and notes, and head upstairs to yet another courtroom.
In this new room, another clerk has placed the paper slips with our names in a cage, like the one they use to choose the lottery balls. He spins the cage and picks out a name.
Juror number one… please take the first seat in the front row, closest to the judge. He reads the name from the paper: Jonathan Hagler.
A man about my age, taller with more hair, though it’s gray, stands and walks through the gate to the front of the room. He climbs up into the jury box and takes the first seat.
Juror number two… please take the seat next to juror number one, in the font row. He reads the name from the paper: Mykel Board.
(Actually, he reads Michael Board, which sounds exactly the same as Mykel Board. But the first is my legal name, the latter my pen… err… e-Name.)
I pick up my computer bag, walk to the front and sit down next to Jonathan.
One by one, the clerk picks other names to fill the rest of the vacant chairs. The college kid sits in the front row of the waiting area. He catches my eye several times. I wonder if we’ll be on the same jury. Weird feeling. Does he know me?
Juror number six… please take the seat next to juror number five, in the font row: Joshua Rothenstein.
A 30-somethingish guy with jeans and a black muscle t-shirt, clicks his tongue loudly enough for the rest of us to hear. He takes his seat at the end of the row I’m sitting in.
Juror number seven… please take the seat at the front of the next row: He reads the name from the paper: Edward Rogers.
Juror number eight… please take the seat next to juror number seven, in the font row. He reads the name from the paper: Jennifer Lopez.
“Really?” says the judge.
There is a scatter of light chuckling in the courtroom. A chunky yet attractive Hispanic-looking woman stands up among the other jurors. Certainly A Jennifer Lopez, but not THE Jennifer Lopez. She sits next to Edward.
Juror number nine… please take the seat next to juror number eight. He reads the name from the paper: Sven Anderson.
There is a stirring from near the back of the courtroom. I hear a vague excuse me. I look up to see who’s coming. It’s the guy with the perfect nose. The beauty who was there with me in the grand jury room. We’re gonna be locked together for how long? We’ll be on intimate terms before you can say, pitcher or catcher? This isn’t gonna be so bad after all.
After the initial 12 seats are filled, each person is questioned by the judge. Just the basics. Education, marital status, job, address, do you know any of the involved parties.
The guy in seat number one isn’t married, has a Masters in Linguistics, is a teacher. He is not me. On my turn, I tell the judge we’re not brothers. That gets some laughs.
The guy at the end of my row is in the orchestra at the Met. MFA in music studies. Is he married?
“Hardly,” he says, “but I’ve had the same boyfriend for 15 years.”
He doesn’t say lover or roommate. He says boyfriend.
Maybe it worked for Marshal. It doesn’t work for this guy. But, he’s got another sleeve up his trick.
The judge thanks him and goes on to the next person. The questioning continues. We learn that we’ve got a grandma “tax-consultant” who doesn’t look like she can read. We’ve got a guy in business for himself—owns a crew of trucks, cranes, heavy machinery. He’s wearing a suit—the only one of us. One woman is from Inwood, one of the few working class neighborhoods left in Manhattan. There are a couple attorneys, one who works for some financial institution, one who works for an insurance company. After the judge questions everyone, he calls on the lawyers interrogate us.
They use this chance to let us know the basics of the case. The plaintiff is a cop who works on the waterfront, the NY City equivalent of the Coast Guard. He was injured while climbing out of a boat onto a dock. Something went wrong with the ladder. It’s not clear whether he slipped, or the ladder broke. I guess we’ll find out during the trial.
The cop’s lawyer looks pure MOB. Big-chested. Full head of grey hair. Expensive suit. A neck as thick as my thigh.
The defendant, of course, is the City of New York. Their lawyer, asking us if we believe that, “sometimes accidents just happen, and nobody is at fault” looks like a Jewish intellectual. Thin guy, gray beard, with a head slightly too big for his body.
“And is there anyone who has a relative in the police force?” asks the city counsel.
The woman from Inwood raises her hand. “I have three nephews who are police officers.”
“Are they all patrolmen, or are they officers?” asks the lawyer.
“Two are patrolmen. One’s an officer,” says the woman.
“Your honor?” says the lawyer to the judge.
“Any objection?” he asks the lawyer for the cop.
The lawyer gets up and asks the woman, “Do you think you can put aside your relatives and decide this case only on its merits?”
The woman doesn’t answer.
“Do you think you can be fair and impartial here?” he asks.
“Of course,” says the woman.
“Fine,” says the judge. And the attorney goes to the next juror.
He gets to the guy with the boyfriend of 15 years.
“I can’t possibly be objective,” says the guy. “I mean I just lo-o-o-ve policemen. I workout with them at the gym every day. I see them all the time. They’re a-a-a-lll my friends. They’re just t-o-o wonderful.”
“Err,” stumbles the attorney, “do you think you could put your… err… special feelings aside and judge this case strictly on the merits?”
“Oh no,” says the young man—with the enthusiasm of a used car salesman, “that would be impossible. I couldn’t be objective. They’re just too wonderful.”
All right,” says the judge, “you’re excused. Thank you for your frankness.”
Suppressing the urge to jump up and clap his hands—but not suppressing a faint smile-- the guy gets up, takes the paper from the judge and heads back to the jury room.
The city lawyers ask a few more questions. I haven’t said anything to hurt my chances of staying on this jury. I should be fine. Sequestered with the boy with the perfect nose.
Now it’s time for the cop’s lawyer to ask the questions.
“This may seem like a strange question,” he says. “But there’s a reason I’m asking it.”
He clears his throat.
“Of all the people alive,” says the lawyer, “who is it that you admire most?”
He pauses for dramatic effect.
“Take a second to consider,” he says, giving it just about that time before he continues. “We’ll start with juror number one.”
“There’s nobody I admire,” the teacher tells the lawyers. “I dislike most people. I think they’re all a bunch of conceited worthless…” He lets this words trail off.
The lawyer, and a few other jurors chuckle a bit.
“And juror number two?” he says.
That’s me! Fuck, it’s a tough one. Everybody I admire is dead. Celine, Lenny Bruce, GG Allin, William Burroughs. Who am I going to say? I don’t wanna lie, but I don’t wanna say anything that will get me kicked off either. There’s that guy with the perfect nose!
“Jimmy Carter,” I say. “I most admire Jimmy Carter.”
“That’s admirable,” he says. “And juror number three?”
He goes down the line. Two of the women in the front row say their mothers. Before long it’s Sven’s turn. He seems to be a brooder, sitting there with his legs crossed at the knee and stretched in front of him. His head is tucked down, chin to chest.
“Dennis Cooper,” he says. “I like Dennis Cooper.”
I don’t turn to look at him.
“Who’s Dennis Cooper?” asks the lawyer.
“He’s a writer.” answers the boy of perfect nose.
The lawyer nods and continues down the line.
Once everyone answers this question, the City lawyer again gets up to speak.
“One thing I forgot to ask,” he says. “You read a lot in the newspapers these days about law suits, and people getting money from lawsuits. Is there anyone out there who has feelings one way or another about the right to sue and collect damages?
A few hands go up. I raise mine too… a bit tentatively.
The attorney calls on the lawyer for the insurance company.
“Every day I see the actual, excuse my language, bullshit that people file these days. They claim the most outrageous things. Day after day I see this crap. I can’t be objective about it.”
“Do you think you could put those feelings aside and judge this case solely on its merits?” asks the lawyer.
“If you would have asked me that last month-- before I got this job, I would have said yes,” says the attorney. “But now, after what I’ve seen. There’s no way. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for being candid,” says the lawyer. “You’re dismissed.”
He hands the guy his walking papers and the clerk calls a replacement, a shlubby looking guy who could be a butcher. After the initial questions, the city attorney continues. He points to me.
“You had your hand raised,” he said. “Do you have feelings about lawsuits?”
“Oh yes,” I say. “I believe in the right to sue. It’s lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits that keep government and big corporations honest. They could run roughshod over the public without fear if it weren’t for lawsuits. The courts are our last protection.”
“Thank you,” said the attorney. “Do you think you could put those feelings aside and judge this case solely on its merits?”
I look at Sven sitting sexily to my right and behind me.
“You bet,” I tell him. “No problem.”
Whew, almost blew that one.
After a few more questions from the lawyers, the judge speaks to us.
“All right ladies and gentlemen of the jury… err… perspective jury. You have gone through what’s called a Voir Dire or “say the truth” process. Thank you for your candid replies. The attorneys will now have a conference where they will decide whether to exercise their preemptory exclusions. That means, they can excuse any juror based on a hunch or gut feeling. These are limited, but lawyers have the right to them. Please don’t take it personally. If you are excused, it is not a reflection on you. It is only a reflection of what the lawyer feels is best for his client. Give them a few minutes.”
When the few minutes is over, the lawyers return.
“We have three jurors excused,” says the judge. He calls the name of the woman from Inwood. He calls the name of one of the woman who most admired her mother. He calls my name. He doesn’t not call Sven’s name.
“Thank you,” says the judge. “After you’re replaced on the jury, you and the rest of the panel should return to the main jury room.”
Discouraged, I climb down from the jury box glancing briefly at the boy with the perfect nose. I join the others in the back of the room. We then head back to the jury waiting room. By the elevator, the guy with the college sweatshirt comes up to me and speaks softly into my ear.
“Jimmy Carter?” he whispers. “Yeah right.”
Flash to now: I’m out in Chelsea, with Steve. Under my arm is Frisk, a novel by Dennis Cooper. It’s a hell of a long shot, but who knows? If Sven, hangs out in the city, he’ll probably be here. At least in this neighborhood. Steve could be my shill. The ugly guy I’ll look so good next to. But he doesn’t want to go into the bar. He’s afraid they’ll go for him. What an idiot!
ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get live links and a chance to email comment on the column]
--> For more information about jury power, and the possibilities of a real jury system, check out www.fija.org. And if you ever get called for jury duty. Just tell the truth, they’ll never pick you.
--> Too Bad Dept: AP reports that Rush Limbaugh was detained at Palm Beach International Airport in June. The problem? He was found with a bottle of Viagra prescribed in his psychologist’s name—not his own. The police were called, but unfortunately, no charges were pressed. Now if it had been you or me…
-->See You at the Finale Dept: In Halberstadt Germany, the local church is sponsoring a John Cage concert scheduled to last 639 years. It’s a version of a composition called "As Slow as Possible." According to a recent press release, a chord change is planned for Friday. Two pipes will be removed from the organ which is being built as the composition proceeds.
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything," said Heinz-Klaus Metzger, a prominent musicologist whose chance comments at an organ conference nine years ago sparked the project. "To begin a performance with the perspective of more than a half-millennium — it's just a kind of negation of the lifestyle of today."
--> Whatever Happened to Consent Dept: I think Kesha forwarded me the article about 3 guys in jail on felony charges of castration without malice and practicing medicine without a license.
Sheriff Tom Alexander and District Attorney Michael Bonfoey announced the arrests of the men in connection with the illegal castrations. The sheriff and prosecutor said the victims were willing participants. The victims met the accused through a locally produced website that published photographs of men engaging in sadomasochistic behavior. Yahoo! shut down the site in December 2004. The castrations took place last year beginning in March and continued through November, according to police documents. The case is the first involving willing castration in the county and could be the first in North Carolina.
“This right here beats everything I have ever seen,” the sheriff said.
Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, said voluntary castration appears to be a very rare phenomenon.
“The people who I have seen who have undergone voluntary castration have been psychotic and often in the grip of a delusion that their sexual organs were causing them to behave in evil ways.” Appelbaum said. “And they felt that to rid themselves of that evil, it was necessary to rid themselves of their sexual organs.”
I say, they sound like the perfect Christians to me. What’s the problem? For Christians, sex is evil. I only wish ALL Christians had the same courtesy these North Carolina guys. It’d sure help reduce the spread of disease. Christianity, I mean. What other disease?
-->Borders without Borders Dept: The Utne Reader points out that the success of the French-based humanitarian group “Doctors Without Borders” has spawned dozens of imitators, anxious to build on the successful franchise. There’s Geeks Without Borders, Sisters Without Borders, Librarians Without Borders and my favorite, Clowns Without Borders.
Stay tuned with your donations for the next installment: Pedophiles Without Borders. Get those checkbooks ready!
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Friday, June 23, 2006
Mykel's Column for MRR 280
You're Wrong
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board
I sit inside a park in Green Bay Wisconsin. In a field to my right are several guys with red t-shirts, and several others with white. A bat, and a fat white ball… softball! Thud. Second pitch. Fly out. Next batter also flies out… deep to center.
Ahead of me some really little kids play a kind of kickball. The kids wear shorts, and knee socks. They may all be girls, I can’t tell from this distance. If I get closer and stare, someone will call the cops.
Shit presses in my large intestine. It’s travel shit. My innards always act strangely while away from home. Not the runs. Just the need-- four or five times a day-- to evacuate long thin brown tubes, occasionally perfectly straight, but more often fragile, broken, or spiraling.
My computer battery will only last a couple hours in the park. I’ve brought a charger that works through the rental car cigarette lighter. With gas at $3.00 a gallon, I should feel reluctant driving around charging the computer, but I love doing it. Driving aimlessly. Listening to a comic detective novel on CD. Then returning to the park to write. I want to write backwards. Tell my story from the most recent to the beginning. Like remembering a dream.
I ate lunch/dinner in a local bar. Fried perch. The waitress collects from me as soon as she brings the food. No bill at the end. Just put down the food, collect. I wonder if all the customers have to pay when served. Or is it just me? Maybe I don’t have an honest face. I’m on a Midwest booktour. Chicago and Wisconsin. 9 shows 10 days. Punkrock.
I arrive in Green Bay from the Wisconsin Peninsula, aka Door County. I’ve left the house of Marge Grutzmacher who handed me a check for $83 for 5 of each book. She owns a bookstore in Sister Bay. After a year, she might sell all five of the Mongolia book. But there’s a hard-on-in-a-lesbo-bars’ chance of her selling even one of my books of columns, much less the five she bought. This is tourist-town Wisconsin. People come here to hunt, fish, boat. They’ll buy The DaVinci Code, not a book where someone gets her vagina stitched shut with boot laces.
Did she buy my books out of the kindness of her heart? Yes! I’ve known her for 35 years and haven’t seen her for the last 30. In fact, I don’t remember meeting her at all. Though, when I see her this time, she immediately looks familiar.
She was the wife of Hal Grutzmacher, Dean of Students at Beloit College, my undergraduate alma matter. Hal was a dean I had constant run-ins with. A dean in a place where I was the badguy. As often happens, my high-positioned enemies become friends when the power relation dissolves. I have a problem with authority.
The kids are leaving now… en masse. They walk by me, oblivious, not curious about what I’m typing, or doing at all.. One little girl says hi to me, then quickens her pace as she passes. I don’t have an honest face.
One year Hal suddenly disappeared from Beloit. I never got the whole scoop. Some say it was an alcohol-related incident. There are other rumors I neither can nor care to remember. Once a year, we kept in touch. His Xmas cards. My New Year cards.
Has it started to rain again?
When I next heard… maybe around 1980, Hal and Marge had moved north to Ephraim, Wisconsin. They opened a bookstore, Pastime Books, and settled into a new, non-academic life. A few years ago, I heard that Hal died. It didn’t stop the cards, however. Marge and I have kept in contact. It’s been a long time.
When I set out to book this tour, Marge offered me a reading at Passtime, in its new home in Sister Bay. A couple of weeks before the scheduled read, I was apologetically disinvited.
“It’s a bad weekend, Mykel,” e-mailed Marge. “Memorial Day. We just don’t get customers. But you should come anyway. It’d be nice to see you.”
Come I did. Marge bought 10 books from me. “For the store.” They’re gonna sit for a long time. It was a kind of charity.
Whoops, the trouble with writing backwards is that time passes forwards. Before you can get back to it, you’ve got more to write. I now sit at O’Hare airport, facing the last stage of this trip. The plane should take off in 7 minutes, but it’s not even in the airport yet. They project an hour and a half delay. Who knows what it’ll end up?
I sit far from the gate. The only noise is the chattering of some black-clothed Muslim woman… cellphone chattering. In my checked bags is a full bottle of Everclear, wedged carefully among my clothes. They won’t allow it in carry-on baggage. It could be an instrument of terrorism. The stuff’s illegal in New York, and I feel like a smuggler. I’ve got a 6 pack of Mickey’s Widemouth in my backpack. Plus multiply wrapped Wisconsin Cheese that is melting in the heat.
I’m really tired. I slept 4 hours last night, after having slept a glorious 9 hours the day before that, after having slept only 3 hours the day before.
I got a ride to the airport today from Lew Brickhate, who brought along his mother. Sid Yiddish, my poet-throat-singing host in Chicago, advised me not to get her riled up. She’s a rabid Republican, he told me. She gets upset easily. Turns out we get along well. We’re both rabid.
It’s 7:30. There’s an announcement. Passengers from flight 6465 scheduled to leave at 12:30 can now board. Passengers for my flight scheduled for 3PM, can also board this one… provided we haven’t checked bags. I’ve checked 2. One with my Everclear. I wait. A kid among the Muslims begins crying. I think back to Appleton Wisconsin, Home of Joseph McCarthy.
Rainbow Books’ partner, Alan Ruff, tells me that The Fugs used to come to Appleton every year on McCarthy’s birthday-- just to piss on his grave. I don’t visit the grave… no time.
I expect to be Christianed to death there. You know: those stupid little Jesus fish on the back of car, a ton of What Would Jesus Do? signs stuck into manicured front lawns. It’s not what I expect.
My reading is at a house party. A basement show, between two bands. The first band has two extremely attractive musicians, one of each gender. I don’t remember their name. The other, called Chinese Telephones, just rocks. I set my books up in the kitchen.
“We weren’t going to play this show,” the Chinese Telephone’s singer tells me. “Then we heard that you were gonna be here, so we changed our minds.”
Yeah! Stroke me! You’ll get an add on MySpace.
As usual, basement punkshows turn out to be the highpoints. I sell half a dozen books. Get plastered.
Hangin’ out at the showhouse, after the show, a long-haired guy, about 15, sits on the couch with us adults. “Come on, let’s put on some music!” he says, walking over to the record collection in the living room. I hear his voice.
“How ‘bout Damaged?” he asks.
“Yowsah!” I say. “That’s one of the ten best records ever made.”
The guy puts on the record and starts to sing along. To the whole thing. He not only knows the words, but all the TV shows in TV Party. He wasn’t even born when that record came out. Ten punk points, kid. You know your history.
Later, I sleep on the couch of a punkhouse where one of the guys is a big lug. He could have been a football player, but is soft, funny and smart instead. He spends the evening cooking pasta and complaining about not being able to get laid.
“If you were hard, stupid and a football player, it would be easy,” I tell him. “This is Wisconsin.”
In the punkhouse, a pretty Oriental girl plays with the cat and kittens. I chuck chuck koochie koo too—but it is other feline-related activities that occupy my mind. Eventually, the girl goes home, leaving me to the couch and my own ministrations.
Except for the lack of poontang, Appleton is the best show of the trip. The biggest crowd. The most merch. The coolest people. After Appleton is Sister Bay and Marge Grutzmacher. After that it’s Green Bay, home of The Packers (off-season) and Norb (also off-season—away camping.)
The show in Green Bay starts with a 50th birthday party. The bass player in BLITZKREIG ROK, a Ramones cover band, is just passing into AARP eligibility. His son plays guitar in the band… and is responsible for most of the dozen or so people at the bar tonight.
It’s an old scummy bar, in the best sense of the word. It’s a place for drunks, not book readers—but it’s friendly enough. At least the bar is friendly. I guess there’s been trouble, though. A crotchety neighbor has posted a notice on the door leading to the building next to the bar. Actually, he has posted several notices:
MEMBER OF POLICE WATCH. 0 TOLERANCE. I CALL POLICE. says one of them.
TUESDAY, MAY 30. WHO WILL GET BEATEN UP OR ROBBED HERE TONIGHT? says another.
A third lists offences from previous months:
JANUARY 10, 2006: SMOKING DOPE IN FRONT OF TAVERN
JANUARY 26, 2006; DRUG SALES ACROSS FROM TAVERN
MARCH 10, 2006: FIGHT ON STREET ACROSS FROM TAVERN
MAY 16, 2006, WOMAN SCREAMING AND CRYING IN FRONT OF TAVERN
MAY 17, 2006: DRUNK WOMAN TRIED TO KICK IN MY DOOR
It could be a novel.
The bartender is also the bar owner and booker. Rev Norb said he was well-meaning, but “an airhead.”
I’m not exactly sure if air is the chemical I’d use to describe his condition. About 5’ 5”, slightly plump, in his mid-40s, he’s got long stringy hair and wears a generic band t-shirt. He works at being accommodating. He likes to talk.
“Oh, you’re the guy,” he says to me when I ask him what time we’re going to start. “I like having these old punks around. Guys still doing what they want to do after all this time. I mean like I try. But I’m sort of married. Not exactly married, but like hooked up. Taking care of my girlfriend’s kid. That means like I’m a good person right? I can’t live like I used to. No punkhouse, but I try, right? I mean like I’m a good person, right?”
“Can I set up a table to sell my books?” I ask
“Sure, I’ll get one for you.” He pulls over a table and sets a chair behind it.
“Can I go on between bands, read a bit, then go on again?”
“Sure, I’ll ask the soundman to do a check for you,” he says.
As a matter of fact, he’s always saying. He never stops. Talks about music, his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s 20 year old son that he takes care of, the business, how hard life is, how he doesn’t get out so much anymore. And more, and more.
Besides me and BLITZKRIEG ROK, there’s a band from Boston called THE COFFIN LIDS. They’re a bunch of late 30-something rockers, tattooed, rockabilly-ish looking, friendlier than the neighbor’s Saint Bernard. They set up their t-shirts and CDs next to my books. Before the night is over, they sell out of t-shirts. I sell one book. To THE FAN.
THE FAN is a large heavy-metal looking guy with a nasty-looking scab between his eyes. It’s as if someone punched him in the face and broke the top of his nose. It was a heavy spurt and only just now, scabbed over.
“Man,” he says, “it’s great meeting you. I used to read you when I was growing up. All that stuff about GG Allin and screwing in the bathroom. Is that all true?”
I nod. “It’s all true, though stretched in some spots.”
“Man,” he says, “you’ve had a life.”
“It ain’t over yet,” I tell him.
He laughs. “I live right here in Green Bay. Not much happens here.”
“This is life,” I tell him. “Something always happens.”
And this is punkrock. Something WILL always happen. Anyone who tours, learns that the night isn’t over when the bands stop playing. Then, it’s PARTY-TIME. Here I am, a 65 year old writer, and I’m off to the punkhouse to listen to CDs (actually watch DVDs) with THE COFFIN LIDS at the house of THE FAN.
The guy’s house is like a record library. CDs, DVDs, 7”, LPs. On the kitchen table lies the 7” from the CHINESE TELEPHONES.
“Hey,” I say, “I just played with these guys.”
It then occurs to me that I don’t play anymore. I read/recite-- or at best, perform.
In the living room, we watch DVDs. There are neither girls, nor attractive buttboys. The Coffin Lids’ bass player is cool though—and not ugly. At this stage, he’s lookin’ better and better every minute. Yowsah! Pull back the sheets.
“I never read,” he tells me. “Well, maybe a fanzine once-in-awhile. I like the idea of reading, but it just takes too much work.”
“You guys got Everclear up here?” I ask. “When I went to undergrad school in Wisconsin, it was illegal. We had to go to Illinois to get it. I hear it’s legal in this state these days. We still can’t get it in New York.”
“You can get it,” says THE FAN. “I just don’t have any now. There’s beer in the refrigerator though.”
On TV, Tom Sneider is interviewing The Sex Pistols.
“What’s it all about, Johnny?” he asks.
I get up to get a beer. It’s Pabst… small cans, regular cans, a giant 40 ounce can like I’ve never seen. Here we are in Wisconsin, America’s beer capital, and all they have is Pabst!
“What’s with this Pabst?” I complain. “This is Wisconsin.”
“Waddaya mean?” says THE FAN. “Pabst is FROM Wisconsin. Milwaukee, ya know? Ever hear of it?”
“Oh.” I say, sheepishly popping open the 40 ouncer and going back to the couch. OK, it ain’t Leinenkugel, but it IS Wisconsin.
Another DVD is on. This one is a compilation of the classic punk bands: Buzzcocks, Ramones, Patti Smith, The Clash. I wonder if I’ll be in the audience at some of these shows. But looking for me is not interesting enough to keep me awake. I look at the clock on my cellphone. 4AM.
“Hey,” I say, “it’s 4AM. I have to get to Sister Bay tomorrow. I don’t know where I’m staying. What do you think I should do?”
“Hold on,” says the Coffin Lids’ bass player. He rummages through his knapsack.
I wonder how that’s going to help me with my sleep problem. Is he gonna pull out a sleeping bag and suggest a quick romp in the other room? But it’s not a sleeping bag he fishes from his pack.
“Here,” he says holding up a bright orange t-shirt. On the front of the shirt, in black letters it says: WHAT WOULD GG ALLIN DO?
Is that what my pal Sid Yiddish thought when he said, sure, Mykel, you can stay here while you’re in Chicago. Is that what he thought when he invited me to pick my way through the books, magazines, cassettes, old LPs of Jack Kerouac? You remember Sid. I’ve written about him before. He’s the rotund poet, tap dancer, throat singer, man of all interests. He’s a freak’s freak. An effortless freak. As unassumingly weird as GG Allin.
What would GG do? When Sid and his pal Mitch drove me to Madison where I promised him a chance to perform for the crowd… when “the crowd” was two people roped in from the other side of the store? Did GG Allin have a driver’s license? I can’t imagine it.
Sid throat sings and recites poetry. I invite him to join me in every town we’re together. He wears a new fashioned yarmulke that looks like a jazz hat. In Madison, the bookstore owner wants to hook him up with a klezmer band called Yid Vicious.
“Wadda double bill,” he says. “Sid Yiddish and Yid Vicious.”
What would GG do?
After the hell flight from Chicago, I’m back home. The front page of the Newspaper of Record— the same newspaper that said there were no bisexuals—reports that there are no humans at all. There are no independent entities with choice and free will. We’re all victims, pushed around by a genetic code that tells us whether or not we’ll be risk-takers, alcoholics or homos, as surely as it tells us if we’ll have brown hair or attached earlobes.
I don't know which is worse. A Supreme Court that says you have no control over your life because the government can take away your property and give it to a private company-after it busts in your door without a warrant. Or a newspaper-supported culture that says you have no control over your destiny because your genes are in charge of everything.
Humanity is free will. The choice between right and wrong, good and bad, boredom or excitement. Without that freedom, we're no longer human.
Jeezus fuckin’ Christ! Don’t take away my Mykel Boardness. Don’t stuff the life I made for myself into my genes.
And what about them? Is Sid Yiddish a tap dancing throat singer because of his grandfather’s genes? Is that kid in Appleton cool enough to know all the words to Damaged because his dad screwed into his mom’s coolness chromosomes? Did Marge Grutzmacher treat me like a lost relative because of a tiny marker in the 273th place in some DNA? What horrible thoughts. What’s more horrible, is that they’re trying to get you to believe this shit. It’s wrong! Not only because it should be wrong. And we should have control over our lives. But because it just is wrong. Plain ole BAD science. Basic science rules say this genetic-behavior stuff is wrong.
The key to science is predictability. If I believe in gravity, I have to predict that when I drop something it will fall. On the rare occasions it doesn’t—a helium balloon for example—I’d better have a reason. In the balloon’s case, it is lighter than air, and if I drop it in a vacuum, it will fall.
If I believe in evolution, I have to predict that a species will change its characteristics to survive better—or it will go extinct. The ever-mutating HIV virus and the dinosaur show that’s true.
If I believe in genetics, I have to predict that two blue-eyed people will not have brown-eyed children and that brown-eyed parents will have mostly brown-eyed kids. That is, in fact, how it works.
You know how many predictive experiments there have been on this new gene stuff? None. Zero. Zilch. You know how many brain scans of people have been done to predict their homosexuality? Their alcoholism? Their risk-taking? None. Zero. Zilch.
What passes for science picks a self-identified group, looks for a common genetic characteristic, doesn’t find one, but finds a tendency. Presto. That’s the cause. It’s as if voting for Bush causes stupidity, rather than results from it.
Oh, it’s a comfortable belief. We don’t have to be responsible for anything. Our genes do it. Hitler and Alcoholics Anonymous are right. Everything’s genetic. There’s no cure—yet. Is that how you want to live?
At times like this, you have to ask yourself What would GG Allin Do? If I know him, he’d take a shit right there on the social scientist’s floor—then throw it at ‘em.
Find a gene for that, Motherfuckers.
ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get some live links and a chance to comment on the columns]
--> It’s gotta be a bandname dept: As if medicine wasn’t loopy enough anyway. National Geographic reports: Three commercial companies are working on the use of medical maggots to treat various blood-related diseases. The maggots, when inserted into a wound, clean and disinfect the wound, preventing infection and allowing better healing. Also under investigation are worm eggs that “are swallowed by patients with inflammatory bowel disease.” Their purpose is to control internal infection.
--> Let sleeping dogs lie dept: While waiting on my interminable flight from Chicago to NY, I happened to thumb through the SkyMall catalog stuck into every seat back. A list of such useless stuff you’ve never seen before! My favorite is: Songs to Make Dogs Happy, a $14.99 CD designed to be played for your dog. This CD is recommended by PETA who says, it’s great for stay-at-home' dogs or dogs who have separation anxiety or are fearful of thunderstorms. Yeah.
--> Benefits of being old dept: One of the benefits of being old is that you get the AARP Bulletin. There you can read lots of stuff not reported in the punkrock press.
One of my favorites is a story about some New Zealand researchers. They discovered a formula that when taken right after strenuous exercise slows the aging process by boosting mitochondrial proteins in the body. The mysterious substance? Chocolate milk.
The same issue (May, 2006) also reports that the German government is now training former prostitutes as geriatric nurses. Streetwalkers are good with people, says a program official, and they have absolutely no fear about touching or being touched.
-->Those d*mn poets dept: Censorship News reports that a Reno, Nevada high school barred a 14 year old from reciting W.H. Auden’s famous poem, The More Loving One. It was supposed to be part of a local poetry contest. The reason? The poem had the words damn and hell in it. Fortunately, the local court overturned the prohibition. The kid won second place and $1,000 bucks.
-->Ah Americans dept: As if you need another reason to acknowledge American’s stupidity, the National Coalition Against Censorship reports that a recent survey says that 1 in 5 Americans believe that the first amendment to the US Constitution protects a citizen’s right to own pets.
-->How ‘bout transplants? dept: I found an old copy of the newspaper Extra. It seems to have my kind of news. One of the stories was about the Toronto Children’s Aid Society that started a program of free hairdos for mothers who beat their children. They say it “reduces aggressive urges.”
Oh yeah, the same paper carries the story of Derek Mayhew who took a British Airways flight from Bahrain to London. He was the only passenger on the plane. He checked one bag. The airline lost it.
-->Useful information dept: Knowing when you’re going to die is useful information for planning the rest of your life. Of course, there’s a website for that. I’ve still got another 30 years. Start getting ready for the funeral! Find your own deathdate at: http://www.deathforecast.com/
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Column 279
You're Wrong
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board
Nothing is so awkward as a demonstration of humanity by the enemy. –Kobo Abe
It’s gonna be a short one this time. (That’s what she said.) I start this while sitting in Bryant Park behind the library. I count the gives and takes. Google gives me free internet access. G-d gives me a sunny day. Alcohol takes my powers of concentration and coherent thought. And the day after tomorrow, Delta will take me to bring my spoken bilge to Chicago and Wisconsin.
It’s been the usual litany of things gone wrong. My computer stops working. Sid calls to cancel my ride to Madison, then last minute, reinstates it. My body wakes up unable to sleep through the night. My brain makes senile mistakes: halting mid sentence, forgetting the word preposition. My bank account uses up the last of my printer’s red ink. That’s my life. It goes wrong, but it goes-- at least until it doesn’t.
Flash ahead a couple days. I now write at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia. I sit in a plush chair in front of an unused row of coin telephones. It would be a peaceful scene if it not for the 20-something two seats down from me. He gabs into his cellphone—non-stop—call after call. He’s on the third.
“I just wanted to tell you I’ve accepted a position in Chicago,” he says.
He wears a t-shirt, torn jeans, and he’s accepted a position. People dressed like that don’t accept positions. They get jobs. Guys in ties and white shirts accept positions. Professors with tweed jackets and elbow patches accept positions. You don’t, future Mr. Cubicle Clerk. Everyone you’re talking to can see that. Don’t you realize what a jerk you are? Mom, the I-love-you-too girl, and your-only-friend-in-Jersey-City-who-you’ll-miss-like-a-brother. They all know what a jerk you are. How come you don’t?
Focus, Mykel! Focus! Back to the laptop.
I had planned this to be an everything-you-know-is-wrong column, but I don’t have the time or space. I’m going to be traveling and will have to email this in from the road. You are just too wrong, and too militant in your wrongness for me to correct everything. I should write a book. I DID write a book. So here I’ll just pick on a few points. At least you’ll get a start.
Like the Christians who say that people who don’t accept Jesus are condemned to damnation, but if you’ve never heard about Jesus, you only go to purgatory. I’m giving you your chance. Here’s THE TRUTH. If you reject it... it’s hell for you, buster.
Flash ahead. I’m madder than a homo who gets a female doctor for his prostate exam. I’m actually sitting in the plane now. It’s parked on the runway. Delayed. Something about thunderstorms in Chicago last night. They caused back-ups today. The airlines have to add more planes to make up for the lost flights. More flights mean more delays. Behind me there’s a crew of raucous laugher. Actually THE crew of raucous laugher. It’s the two stewardesses on this flight. It’s an ugly annoying sound when I feel so awful.
[Aside: Robert Heinlein once wrote that laughter was a disgusting reflex. We do it when someone is in pain, falls down the stairs, or just fucks up in an embarrassing way. Look at comedy. Except for word-play jokes, we laugh at pain: dead babies, or humiliation: Polish people turning ladders to change light bulbs. I rarely laugh.]
Besides the stewardesses’ guffaws, a baby cries, and half the passengers yak on cellphones.
Like me, the woman in the next seat taps away on her laptop. I’m not sure if I can steal a glance to find out what she’s doing. I don’t think you can check your email from a plane, and most people are ashamed to play solitaire in front of others… even Free Cell, which I’m up to a 12% winning percentage at the 4-suit level.
So it’s exactly at this point I’m going to begin to explain the ways in which you are wrong. One of them is the way you make villains of people rather than ideas.
Newspapers report that 36% of Americans don’t like Georgie Bush. Rolling Stone writes that he’s the worst president in history. That should tell you something. The underdog. Hated in the nation. You’d expect punkrockers would be knee-jerk coming to his defense, like Republicans defending Enron. But no. There’s just a chorus of glee at his unpopularity. You cheer every failure. Ignore the few victories.
But let’s look. George proposed building a wall between the US and Mexico. BAD. He proposed allowing illegal aliens a fast track to stay in the US permanently. GOOD. As anti-Muslim fervor rises in America, Bush wants to sell US ports to the Arabs. That takes balls.
Bush stands by his appointments, his friends, his principles. He doesn’t waver even if the public is against him. When gas prices rose and people turned against Clinton, that spineless sleazebag opened the oil reserves, depleting our safety supply to save his poll numbers ass. Bush could have, but didn’t.
The man has integrity. Just like one of my other heroes, Saddam Hussein. I may not want either of them as neighbors, but I respect that integrity… and I wouldn’t mind having them as friends.
From Bush to broccoli. It’s time to go on the veggie warpath again. I’ve seen too much spinach and tofu lately. It’s making me sick.
Most thinking people assume that vegetarians are self-righteous rich kids who jump on moral bandwagons as fast as they jump on musical ones. Most thinking people are right.
Most thinking people also assume that except for the annoyance of being told that what you eat is immoral, causing pain and suffering, vegetarians are harmless. Most thinking people are wrong.
Opening shot: a meadow. Shoot this through a blue-pink lens so everything looks peaceful and happy. Cows lazily graze, chewing their cud while happy chickens peck joyfully at corn, worms, and other natural bird food.
Mistress Mary tends to her flock of sheep, dancing along, la de da. She stops on a large rock, pulls a bottle of Snapple out of her pocket and chugs it down. Her flock lazily catches up with her, wagging their tails behind them. One of the woolly creatures nuzzles Mary. The cute animal tries to drink from the girl’s bottle. Mary laughs, tilting the Snapple so the animal can lick it down.
Cut to the industrial orange lens. Streak it with gray or black for a grimy polluted look. A dark building holds tiny stalls, one next to the other: Wild-eyed cows, unable to move. Row upon row of chicken coops. One piled on top of the other. Shit pouring down in an ever-increasing brown rain from the top coops to the others below. Beaks painfully trimmed, the nearly paralyzed chickens peck their breakfast of offal and discarded parts of other chickens.
Your choice of scenes? You betcha.
The way the market works is if you choose the free-range chickens, the happy cows, the tail-wagging lambs, there will be more free-range chickens, happy cows, and tail-wagging lambs. If you choose the concentration camp meat, there will be more of that. Demand and supply.
And if you don’t choose? Then your vote goes to the concentration camp. Businesses always do what’s cheaper, more efficient, more harmful, unless the government-- or market forces-- make them do otherwise. With the vegetarians taking themselves out of the picture, the only market forces left are Wal-mart and Burger King. Which side do you think they’re on?
If people don’t buy from the good guys, then the good guys go out of business. By not buying human meat, vegetarians help create torture and disease for the animals they don’t eat. That’s how the market works. But that’s not the end of it. Vegetarians also create disease for the rest of us… the human animals.
No one injects nasty chemicals into those happy animals in the happy meadow. Nobody feeds them bovine growth hormone. Nobody fills them with antibiotics to protect them from the shit falling on them. No shit falls on these animals in the first place.
But the miserable animals-- the ones forced on us by the vegetarians—they’ve got more horrible substances in their bodies than I’ve had up my ass. It’s a wonder they can call a chicken leg “chicken,” it’s got so much else in it. Tenderizers, salt, drugs of all descriptions, bacteria, you name it. All put there to protect the animal from the conditions vegetarians force them to live in. That shit is in OUR food. And even if the vegetarians manage to avoid it, they’ve forced it on the rest of us.
So we see that vegetarians force cruelty to animals, disease on non-vegetarians, and are responsible for everything bad except global warming. Wrong.
They’re responsible for that too.
One of the greatest contributors to global warming is methane. That’s the gas you light when you light a fart. Our bodies make it from the food we eat. It comes out in farts and shit.
Until vegetarian-encouraged factory farming, methane was only unpleasant—like vegetarians themselves. A fart in an elevator might unleash a few giggles, a cough or two, but not a whole lot more. Entering a bathroom where someone has just unleashed a holy beershit—especially a holy Guinness beershit—is an unpleasant experience, but not a serious one.
Factory farming has changed that. They’ve created incredible concentrations of animals. That means incredible concentrations of animal farts and shits. Giant continuous blasts of methane invade the atmosphere, are trapped by it. This methane, in turn, traps heat that would normally move to the upper stratosphere and dissipate. This heat is known as global warming.
Animals return nutrients to the soil. When they are well-managed and not too packed, they fertilize what feeds them. A pig eats carrots, shits nutrients back into the ground, making fertile ground for more carrots. Eating high on the food chain allows us to cull porcine over-population and keep the cycle going. If I eat a pig, I stop the fertilization, but I also stop the consumption. If I eat a carrot, I only stop plant production, while doing nothing to reduce plant consumption. Highest on the food chain is, of course, cannibalism. Checking out the overpopulation of vegetarians, that might not be such a bad idea.
Another way you’re wrong is your knee-jerk hatred of big corporations. You pin them with the same crooked safety pin that you pin on Dubya or meat. Like with those others, you’ve missed this one too.
I now write sitting on a park bench by a river in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. A few people fish from the nearby bridge. River water bubbles gently as it passes me. On the bench a few yards from me, an older colored lady rests with her feet up. A book in her hand, she lazily turns the pages. She doesn’t notice me looking at her.
I think about how her world’s been changed.
“Yeah,” I think, “I hate Barnes and Nobles and the way they’ve destroyed small bookstores. I hate Amazon-dot-Com for destroying bookstore browsing culture… and making huge contributions to the Republican Party. But if it weren’t for Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and Borders, this Negress might not have her book.
Huge corporations bring books and reading to millions of towns like Beaver Dam. People there might never see a book otherwise. Every shopping mall has a Barnes and Noble or Borders. Every computer has access to Amazon. Millions of people who might never read a book, now buy them because they can. Millions of people, who would never make the effort to step into their local libraries, pass Barnes and Noble and go in, just because it’s there. It’s a place to cool off. A place to sit and read. And for all their destructiveness in big cities, they may just be saving bookdom in towns like Beaver Dam.
My computer is beeping at me. The battery has almost run out. I’ve got to get back on the road anyway… head for the show in Appleton.
Next month I’ll write about my adventures here. In the meantime, stand up, walk to the bathroom. Look in the mirror. Point to yourself and repeat after me: YOU’RE WRONG.
ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get live links and a place to comment]
--> Whatever happened to the stockpile? dept. According to The Progressive magazine (March 2005), a US Air Force research team in the 90s recommended developing chemical weapons consisting of aphrodisiacs. The idea was to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another as a diversion. An added benefit would be the low morale caused by the resulting homosexuality-- especially in Islamic countries. The plan was later abandoned.
-->Toronto based This Magazine has created a website where Americans who want to hightail it up North can find a mate who'll marry them out of their servitude. Want to be a Canadian? Check www.actforlove.org
-->The Japanese Solution: Unlike America, Japan does not have immigration to save it from becoming an aging country. Since there are fewer workers supporting more oldsters, the oldsters are getting less money and fewer benefits. Some of them have figured out a way to insure themselves a warm bed and 3 meals a day: CRIME!
The AARP reports that Japanese old-times have turned to a life of crime in order to get caught and put into prison. There, their accommodations and meals are taken care of. Sex too, probably.
-->Your government at work dept: that same issue of the AARP Bulletin (April, 2006) reports on Judy Lewis, a 68-year old Texan. She survived a stroke in December of last year, but the Social Security Administration pronounced her dead and canceled her benefits. Her congressman helped get her checks restored, but the SS still counts her as deceased.
--> Man, check out that… er… where was I? dept: The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (Feb. 2006) reports on a Toronto research team that discovered that older peoples’ brains change in a way that make it hard to filter out distractions and stay focused. Something about left-brain right-brain balance. I’ll give you the details right after… what was that sound?
--> My jailed pal Cassidy Wheeler was thrown in the hole again for holding his pants up with a broken plastic safety razor. He tells me he’s more persecuted for being a punk rocker than for violating rules. He needs outside contacts—and lawyers. Write to him at: Cassidy Wheeler #14282456, O.S.P., 2605 State St., Salem OR 97310.
--> Finally getting smart department: The ACLU which, until recently, contented itself with issuing boring proclamations about our eroding personal freedoms seems to have finally gotten smart. They’re making the point entertainingly. I hear they’re gonna have TV commercials and sponsor a crime show. They’ve made a good start on the internet. Check out http://www.aclu.org/pizza/ for starters.
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board
Nothing is so awkward as a demonstration of humanity by the enemy. –Kobo Abe
It’s gonna be a short one this time. (That’s what she said.) I start this while sitting in Bryant Park behind the library. I count the gives and takes. Google gives me free internet access. G-d gives me a sunny day. Alcohol takes my powers of concentration and coherent thought. And the day after tomorrow, Delta will take me to bring my spoken bilge to Chicago and Wisconsin.
It’s been the usual litany of things gone wrong. My computer stops working. Sid calls to cancel my ride to Madison, then last minute, reinstates it. My body wakes up unable to sleep through the night. My brain makes senile mistakes: halting mid sentence, forgetting the word preposition. My bank account uses up the last of my printer’s red ink. That’s my life. It goes wrong, but it goes-- at least until it doesn’t.
Flash ahead a couple days. I now write at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia. I sit in a plush chair in front of an unused row of coin telephones. It would be a peaceful scene if it not for the 20-something two seats down from me. He gabs into his cellphone—non-stop—call after call. He’s on the third.
“I just wanted to tell you I’ve accepted a position in Chicago,” he says.
He wears a t-shirt, torn jeans, and he’s accepted a position. People dressed like that don’t accept positions. They get jobs. Guys in ties and white shirts accept positions. Professors with tweed jackets and elbow patches accept positions. You don’t, future Mr. Cubicle Clerk. Everyone you’re talking to can see that. Don’t you realize what a jerk you are? Mom, the I-love-you-too girl, and your-only-friend-in-Jersey-City-who-you’ll-miss-like-a-brother. They all know what a jerk you are. How come you don’t?
Focus, Mykel! Focus! Back to the laptop.
I had planned this to be an everything-you-know-is-wrong column, but I don’t have the time or space. I’m going to be traveling and will have to email this in from the road. You are just too wrong, and too militant in your wrongness for me to correct everything. I should write a book. I DID write a book. So here I’ll just pick on a few points. At least you’ll get a start.
Like the Christians who say that people who don’t accept Jesus are condemned to damnation, but if you’ve never heard about Jesus, you only go to purgatory. I’m giving you your chance. Here’s THE TRUTH. If you reject it... it’s hell for you, buster.
Flash ahead. I’m madder than a homo who gets a female doctor for his prostate exam. I’m actually sitting in the plane now. It’s parked on the runway. Delayed. Something about thunderstorms in Chicago last night. They caused back-ups today. The airlines have to add more planes to make up for the lost flights. More flights mean more delays. Behind me there’s a crew of raucous laugher. Actually THE crew of raucous laugher. It’s the two stewardesses on this flight. It’s an ugly annoying sound when I feel so awful.
[Aside: Robert Heinlein once wrote that laughter was a disgusting reflex. We do it when someone is in pain, falls down the stairs, or just fucks up in an embarrassing way. Look at comedy. Except for word-play jokes, we laugh at pain: dead babies, or humiliation: Polish people turning ladders to change light bulbs. I rarely laugh.]
Besides the stewardesses’ guffaws, a baby cries, and half the passengers yak on cellphones.
Like me, the woman in the next seat taps away on her laptop. I’m not sure if I can steal a glance to find out what she’s doing. I don’t think you can check your email from a plane, and most people are ashamed to play solitaire in front of others… even Free Cell, which I’m up to a 12% winning percentage at the 4-suit level.
So it’s exactly at this point I’m going to begin to explain the ways in which you are wrong. One of them is the way you make villains of people rather than ideas.
Newspapers report that 36% of Americans don’t like Georgie Bush. Rolling Stone writes that he’s the worst president in history. That should tell you something. The underdog. Hated in the nation. You’d expect punkrockers would be knee-jerk coming to his defense, like Republicans defending Enron. But no. There’s just a chorus of glee at his unpopularity. You cheer every failure. Ignore the few victories.
But let’s look. George proposed building a wall between the US and Mexico. BAD. He proposed allowing illegal aliens a fast track to stay in the US permanently. GOOD. As anti-Muslim fervor rises in America, Bush wants to sell US ports to the Arabs. That takes balls.
Bush stands by his appointments, his friends, his principles. He doesn’t waver even if the public is against him. When gas prices rose and people turned against Clinton, that spineless sleazebag opened the oil reserves, depleting our safety supply to save his poll numbers ass. Bush could have, but didn’t.
The man has integrity. Just like one of my other heroes, Saddam Hussein. I may not want either of them as neighbors, but I respect that integrity… and I wouldn’t mind having them as friends.
From Bush to broccoli. It’s time to go on the veggie warpath again. I’ve seen too much spinach and tofu lately. It’s making me sick.
Most thinking people assume that vegetarians are self-righteous rich kids who jump on moral bandwagons as fast as they jump on musical ones. Most thinking people are right.
Most thinking people also assume that except for the annoyance of being told that what you eat is immoral, causing pain and suffering, vegetarians are harmless. Most thinking people are wrong.
Opening shot: a meadow. Shoot this through a blue-pink lens so everything looks peaceful and happy. Cows lazily graze, chewing their cud while happy chickens peck joyfully at corn, worms, and other natural bird food.
Mistress Mary tends to her flock of sheep, dancing along, la de da. She stops on a large rock, pulls a bottle of Snapple out of her pocket and chugs it down. Her flock lazily catches up with her, wagging their tails behind them. One of the woolly creatures nuzzles Mary. The cute animal tries to drink from the girl’s bottle. Mary laughs, tilting the Snapple so the animal can lick it down.
Cut to the industrial orange lens. Streak it with gray or black for a grimy polluted look. A dark building holds tiny stalls, one next to the other: Wild-eyed cows, unable to move. Row upon row of chicken coops. One piled on top of the other. Shit pouring down in an ever-increasing brown rain from the top coops to the others below. Beaks painfully trimmed, the nearly paralyzed chickens peck their breakfast of offal and discarded parts of other chickens.
Your choice of scenes? You betcha.
The way the market works is if you choose the free-range chickens, the happy cows, the tail-wagging lambs, there will be more free-range chickens, happy cows, and tail-wagging lambs. If you choose the concentration camp meat, there will be more of that. Demand and supply.
And if you don’t choose? Then your vote goes to the concentration camp. Businesses always do what’s cheaper, more efficient, more harmful, unless the government-- or market forces-- make them do otherwise. With the vegetarians taking themselves out of the picture, the only market forces left are Wal-mart and Burger King. Which side do you think they’re on?
If people don’t buy from the good guys, then the good guys go out of business. By not buying human meat, vegetarians help create torture and disease for the animals they don’t eat. That’s how the market works. But that’s not the end of it. Vegetarians also create disease for the rest of us… the human animals.
No one injects nasty chemicals into those happy animals in the happy meadow. Nobody feeds them bovine growth hormone. Nobody fills them with antibiotics to protect them from the shit falling on them. No shit falls on these animals in the first place.
But the miserable animals-- the ones forced on us by the vegetarians—they’ve got more horrible substances in their bodies than I’ve had up my ass. It’s a wonder they can call a chicken leg “chicken,” it’s got so much else in it. Tenderizers, salt, drugs of all descriptions, bacteria, you name it. All put there to protect the animal from the conditions vegetarians force them to live in. That shit is in OUR food. And even if the vegetarians manage to avoid it, they’ve forced it on the rest of us.
So we see that vegetarians force cruelty to animals, disease on non-vegetarians, and are responsible for everything bad except global warming. Wrong.
They’re responsible for that too.
One of the greatest contributors to global warming is methane. That’s the gas you light when you light a fart. Our bodies make it from the food we eat. It comes out in farts and shit.
Until vegetarian-encouraged factory farming, methane was only unpleasant—like vegetarians themselves. A fart in an elevator might unleash a few giggles, a cough or two, but not a whole lot more. Entering a bathroom where someone has just unleashed a holy beershit—especially a holy Guinness beershit—is an unpleasant experience, but not a serious one.
Factory farming has changed that. They’ve created incredible concentrations of animals. That means incredible concentrations of animal farts and shits. Giant continuous blasts of methane invade the atmosphere, are trapped by it. This methane, in turn, traps heat that would normally move to the upper stratosphere and dissipate. This heat is known as global warming.
Animals return nutrients to the soil. When they are well-managed and not too packed, they fertilize what feeds them. A pig eats carrots, shits nutrients back into the ground, making fertile ground for more carrots. Eating high on the food chain allows us to cull porcine over-population and keep the cycle going. If I eat a pig, I stop the fertilization, but I also stop the consumption. If I eat a carrot, I only stop plant production, while doing nothing to reduce plant consumption. Highest on the food chain is, of course, cannibalism. Checking out the overpopulation of vegetarians, that might not be such a bad idea.
Another way you’re wrong is your knee-jerk hatred of big corporations. You pin them with the same crooked safety pin that you pin on Dubya or meat. Like with those others, you’ve missed this one too.
I now write sitting on a park bench by a river in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. A few people fish from the nearby bridge. River water bubbles gently as it passes me. On the bench a few yards from me, an older colored lady rests with her feet up. A book in her hand, she lazily turns the pages. She doesn’t notice me looking at her.
I think about how her world’s been changed.
“Yeah,” I think, “I hate Barnes and Nobles and the way they’ve destroyed small bookstores. I hate Amazon-dot-Com for destroying bookstore browsing culture… and making huge contributions to the Republican Party. But if it weren’t for Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and Borders, this Negress might not have her book.
Huge corporations bring books and reading to millions of towns like Beaver Dam. People there might never see a book otherwise. Every shopping mall has a Barnes and Noble or Borders. Every computer has access to Amazon. Millions of people who might never read a book, now buy them because they can. Millions of people, who would never make the effort to step into their local libraries, pass Barnes and Noble and go in, just because it’s there. It’s a place to cool off. A place to sit and read. And for all their destructiveness in big cities, they may just be saving bookdom in towns like Beaver Dam.
My computer is beeping at me. The battery has almost run out. I’ve got to get back on the road anyway… head for the show in Appleton.
Next month I’ll write about my adventures here. In the meantime, stand up, walk to the bathroom. Look in the mirror. Point to yourself and repeat after me: YOU’RE WRONG.
ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get live links and a place to comment]
--> Whatever happened to the stockpile? dept. According to The Progressive magazine (March 2005), a US Air Force research team in the 90s recommended developing chemical weapons consisting of aphrodisiacs. The idea was to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another as a diversion. An added benefit would be the low morale caused by the resulting homosexuality-- especially in Islamic countries. The plan was later abandoned.
-->Toronto based This Magazine has created a website where Americans who want to hightail it up North can find a mate who'll marry them out of their servitude. Want to be a Canadian? Check www.actforlove.org
-->The Japanese Solution: Unlike America, Japan does not have immigration to save it from becoming an aging country. Since there are fewer workers supporting more oldsters, the oldsters are getting less money and fewer benefits. Some of them have figured out a way to insure themselves a warm bed and 3 meals a day: CRIME!
The AARP reports that Japanese old-times have turned to a life of crime in order to get caught and put into prison. There, their accommodations and meals are taken care of. Sex too, probably.
-->Your government at work dept: that same issue of the AARP Bulletin (April, 2006) reports on Judy Lewis, a 68-year old Texan. She survived a stroke in December of last year, but the Social Security Administration pronounced her dead and canceled her benefits. Her congressman helped get her checks restored, but the SS still counts her as deceased.
--> Man, check out that… er… where was I? dept: The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (Feb. 2006) reports on a Toronto research team that discovered that older peoples’ brains change in a way that make it hard to filter out distractions and stay focused. Something about left-brain right-brain balance. I’ll give you the details right after… what was that sound?
--> My jailed pal Cassidy Wheeler was thrown in the hole again for holding his pants up with a broken plastic safety razor. He tells me he’s more persecuted for being a punk rocker than for violating rules. He needs outside contacts—and lawyers. Write to him at: Cassidy Wheeler #14282456, O.S.P., 2605 State St., Salem OR 97310.
--> Finally getting smart department: The ACLU which, until recently, contented itself with issuing boring proclamations about our eroding personal freedoms seems to have finally gotten smart. They’re making the point entertainingly. I hear they’re gonna have TV commercials and sponsor a crime show. They’ve made a good start on the internet. Check out http://www.aclu.org/pizza/ for starters.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
MRR Column 278 (sent May 1, 2006)
You're Wrong
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board
As individuals, we Jews are like everybody else. We may be less prone to drunkenness, we may be more prominent in certain professions, and we may have produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other people; but we don’t boast about these things.
-- Rabbi John D. Ruyner, Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London
I probe my thumb deeply into my right nostril. Forward, toward the tip. The side of the nail scrapes a crusty mass. No room. I switch fingers. The pinky. This is what it’s made for. I wiggle it inside until I manage to catch the top of that crusty mass. I pull. A sharp pain. I wince, withdraw, and try again. Tug. Tug. Uh, aaaah, got it. Loosened and free. Needing only to be withdrawn. Damn, I lost it again. Somewhere high. I don’t want it to escape into a sinus or be drawn into a lung. I hold the top of my nose on either side and blow. Hard. Fast. There it comes. Reaching back in with the thumb, I snag it. Drag it down until I can pinch the thing between my thumb and index finger and take it out completely.
I hold it up to the light to examine it. Green, with flecks of blood red. It’s about the size of a small pea. I put my pinkie back into my nose and withdraw it. The fingertip is crimson with fresh blood.
Shift: I’ve just returned from a 10 day tour of the Northwest. Book readings, heavy drinking. I wrote about it last month, except for the part about the strip club in Portland where this girl had the most amazing breast control I’ve ever seen.. Dancing to the music, she pretends she’s tied strings to her nipples.
Using her fingers to pull up and down on the fake strings, her breasts jerk up and down exactly as if tied to real strings. She bounces her breasts, hands-free, one at a time, up-down. Like you might raise your fingers to type on the keyboard. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump.
In the back of the club lies a secret passageway that leads to the burrito place around the corner. After the puppet-breast set, my hosts and I go through the passageway and order burritos. Then, we return to the strip club. Faster than a beanfart, the burritos are delivered to our seats—right in front of the stage.
My hosts tell me that, in addition to the highest bar count per capita, Portland has the most per capita strip clubs. It’s weird that people know these things, but I guess it’s part of their identity as Portlanders. I could live there.
Shift again. The deadline approaches for another column. My trip stories have run out. (Except for a fire hydrant running smack into the back of my rental car, but what’s to tell?) I look for inspiration for number 278.
I find it in number 10, where I first started writing for this zine. I find it in all those early columns. I find it in the changes since that time. In what I did, but never said.
I look back and see that 20 years ago, other columnists didn’t write about their own lives and adventures. They wrote about lofty ideas and punk purity. I wrote about anal folds. Now, others do. Other columnists didn’t write in the present tense. They wrote about things as if they were historians. Like they were telling about something that happened long ago and far away. They couldn’t grab the immediacy, the what-happens-next of the present. They were detached and impersonal. I wrote in the present. Now others do.
Other columnists didn’t write about sex, except in passing, as jokes, or to talk about how awful and exploitative it is. I wrote about sex. Others do now. Other columnists didn’t mention their own faults, their pimples, their falling-out hair, their dribbles-not-spurts. I wrote about that. A few others do now. No one else had Endnotes in 1982. Check it out now.
Am I saying I’m responsible for all this? Am I saying if it weren’t for me, columns would be nothing more than thoughts on how bad GW Bush is and how good CRASS was? YES! That’s exactly what I’m saying, but I don’t want to boast.
Shift back to my booger. Like that booger pulled from my nose, I love removing things from my body. I scrape off those calloused brown skin marks that old Jews get. I pop the whitehead on my cheek, letting the white pus ooze down my fingernail. I rub the loose flesh from between my toes. I dig in my anal folds for the recalcitrant dingleberry that I just know is there.
A young white-trash couple visit New York. They wheel their gender-ambiguous toddler in one of those new 3-wheeled strollers. The kid softly gums the ear of little teddy bear. The parents stop to read the menu in the window of The Noho Star. The toddler takes the bear from its mouth and throws it on the ground.
I reach down and pick it up.
“Your baby dropped this,” I say to Mom, as I hand the toy to the kid.
“Thanks,” says Mom.
The kid shakes the bear a couple of times and throws it on the ground again.
Mom takes it this time and hugs it to her chest. The child screams.
“I won’t give it to you if you’re going to throw it away,” she says.
The kid doesn’t get it. He (or she?) screams louder, reaching up, straining against the stroller seatbelt, in a vain effort to reach the bear.
“Don’t give it to him,” says Dad. “He’ll just throw it on the ground again. It’s probably filthy already. Remember, this is New York.”
Mom wants to give in. She does, handing the bear back to the child. The child stops crying… and immediately throws the bear on the ground again.
This time Dad grabs it.
“That does it,” he says. “Let’s get out of here. This place is too expensive anyway.”
“Don’t you know it’s healthy for kids to do that?” I don’t yell after them as they waddle off into the distance. “Don’t you know that’s how kids learn the limits of self? That child is only discovering me and not me. It’s what kids do. It’s what everyone should do.”
Centuries before me, Rene Descartes did his own bear throwing/booger pulling. He too tried to scrape everything away until he came to a center that was really him. He called it THINKING. But GW Bush, a six pack of Sparks, and most of the readers of this zine have shown me that it’s easy to exist and NOT think. So the core must be something else.
I mean, what about you? Are you a punk? A lefty? An anarchist? How long will you stay one? What’s your core?
People usually start as lefty idealists. As they age, they grow increasingly conservative. Punkbands bands start their musical lives as idealistic social activists and end their careers wiggling on stage in Las Vegas. Charges of hypocrite and sell-out follow every move. The band either spends time and energy lamely trying to defend itself, or it simply cuts itself off from its old world and embraces the change.
In Anti-Flag’s UNDERGROUND album they say, Just take a look around the world and you're going to find that nearly all mass media are owned and controlled by a handful of conservative capitalists. We must devise and implement alternative methods of distributing our ideas -- People worldwide working together to make a stand, to tell the truth!
Anti-Flag jumps to RCA-Sony, the notorious major label that infects computers with spyware—just by playing their CDs. You’d expect a chorus of “sell-outs” and rants against hypocrisy. Yet, when I google Anti-flag and RCA and Sell-out, most of the 318 sites that come up defend the band. They say their heroes are NOT sell-outs. They explain how they are getting the word out—avoiding preaching to the choir. Gaining new converts to a righteous cause.
I dunno. It’s my guess that Anti-flag are throwing down their teddy bears. They’ve decided that smallness is not them. They’ve decided the singing to the sung-to is not them. They’ve decided that touring in a rent-a-van is not them. With each this is not me, they have to decide what is them. Or what they really want.
They want to live from their music. They want to get laid more. They want more money. They want to spread their message to more people. I don’t know. Maybe, they don’t know. They’re learning. Picking up the major label, and maybe throwing it down again, like Bad Religion did.
I’m not writing this to criticize Anti-flag. Any band that uses the words devise and implement does not need me to criticize it. Besides, it’s YOU I want to talk about. Not them. YOU haven’t examined life without the teddy bear yet. In fact, you have such a furious grip on it; you can’t tell where YOU end and the bear begins.
Right now, you’ve gripped your own ideas so tightly that you’ve made people believe they ARE you. When you finally throw them down, your friends are gonna point their fingers. You may not jump to SONY, but you’ll have more money—and a family. You’ll change your politics. They’ll call you a sell-out. You’ll throw your friends down too. You’ll say you’ve outgrown them.
Where will it come from, this change? Usually, the move from left to right comes with money and family. If you have money, you want more. You want to keep it, spend it on yourself, not give it to people who don’t have money. You want to protect your money and what it’s bought. You want to build prisons, keep away foreigners, get the local beggar off the street. You lose track of where you end and where your money begins. You begin to think that because you WORKED you deserve the money. Why should you give it to someone who just sits on the street and asks? Money IS you. And you don’t want to part with it.
And family? The pull of family is so strong Republicans win elections by appealing to it. Disney sells stock with it. When you have a family—especially kids, the family is first. Everything else be damned.
I love my family. Sometimes they piss me off. Sometimes they annoy me, but I still am happy when I see them and am sad when one kicks the bucket. But they are not me. When I travel, I leave them behind. When I’m home, they’re a burden more than an asset. People say blood is thicker than water. Maybe. But is blood thicker than ink? I dunno.
So what am I? What’s the closest things to me? As I type this, I think about what’s close. My boots, my jeans, my Stackers t-shirt?
It’s clear I’m not my clothes. I can take them off—and do—more often than most people would want. But my clothes are a choice. They come from somewhere inside. They may not me, but they are OF me. I use Dick Tracy, Lemmy Caution, Mike Hammer, like other punk columnists use me. I choose what I wear because it means something I like. It is NOT be me, but it lets people know about me.
Big Mike Loney tells this anecdote:
Mike’s working the door at ABC NO Rio. Some tall guy with a spiked jacket comes in. Mohawk to here, leather pants, torn DISCHARGE t-shirt, old Doc Martins… the works. Following him is a rather ordinary-looking guy, California style, loose long shorts, sneakers, a backwards baseball hat. The mohawk guy looks the other guy up and down, then points toward his feet.
“Tube socks!” he says, laughing. “Get this guy. He’s wearing tube socks!”
It is funny to imagine the big mohawk lug putting down someone for something so minor. It’s funnier to think he even noticed the tube socks. I laughed too. But now that I think about it, I’m not so sure.
The big punk decided what he was going to wear. He spent hours on his hair. Every aspect of his appearance was calculated. He had a self image, THIS IS ME, and dressed accordingly.
The other guy didn’t think twice about his clothes. Tube socks are cheap, so he’ll wear ‘em. I don’t think the big guy was right to laugh, but he was more conscious of himself than the littler guy.
Like Mr. Mohawk, my clothes are a reflection of what I am. They are the weirdo, the detective, the outsider, the guy who creeps around with a magnifying glass, exposing the wicked, throwing light on the hidden darkness. I am not ONLY my clothes, but they are part of me.
So what’s the point?
It’s that you’re stuck with somethings, you copy others, and still others you create. The real you is what you choose from among those things. What you allow people to see. What you consider and what you don’t. I choose pretty carefully. I choose paths others don’t take. I make paths for others to walk on. You’re free to walk on them, take another paths or make your own. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve made, but I don’t want to boast.
ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get a few extra endnotes]
--> Real vinyl dept: In Vancouver, I discovered a cool vinyl-only record store creatively called VINYL. The owner, David Jones (no, he was NOT in The Monkees) bought at least one of everything I had. He bought two of some. He’s interested in building a punk section in his store.
Contact him at vinylrecords1@telus.net or 1-604-488-1234
--> Credit where it’s due dept: When I talked about how I changed the face of zine columns, I did not include two points:
One is that other columnists did not simply imitate me. They used my ideas, or were influenced by those ideas and took them in a new way. Or maybe it’s that great minds flow coincidently in the same gutter. Some column writers—even in this zine—have developed a completely unique style, using the tools I brought to column makers. I’m not accusing anyone of plagiarism. The guy who built a bookcase did not plagiarize the guy who invented the hammer.
Two is that not everyone followed my lead. The Rev. Norb (C.R.I.P.) is NOT often imitated, or copied. But he IS the most original voice in punkdom. I don’t know what his influences are, but he is the king of creativity.
--> There’s racism and then there’s racism dept: In April, The Nebraska Legislature voted to divide the Omaha school system into three districts – one black, one white and one Hispanic.
Supporters, including the legislature's only black senator, said the plan would give minorities control over their own school board. It would ensure that their children are not "shortchanged" in favor of white youngsters. Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, signed the measure into law.
Sen. Pat Bourne of Omaha condemned the bill. "We will go down in history as one of the first states in 20 years to set race relations back," the Democrat said.
"History will not, and should not, judge us kindly," said another senator.
"There is no intent to create segregation," said the black senator. He argued that the district is already segregated, because it no longer buses students and instead requires them to attend their neighborhood school. He said the black students he represents would receive a better education if they had more control over their district.
I say, the whole thing is fucked up and shows that “local control” even at the state level is THE PROBLEM, not THE SOLUTION. How ‘bout if America becomes like every other country (G-d forbid!) and has one set of rules for ALL schools? Then we wouldn’t have to worry about teaching creationism in Kansas or Ebonics-as-a-second-language in San Francisco. Local control is local out of control.
-->Predicting the unpredictable dept: The US Transportation Security Administration said they were going to lighten up a bit. They’ll allow short scissors, and tools in your airplane carry ons. A return to senses? Not so fast!
The TSA also announces, “more frequent searches of body and property at various checkpoints in the airport.” This they said will make the skies safer by “incorporating unpredictability” into the airline process.
They want unpredictability? They should hire some terrorists. That’ll give ‘em unpredictability. Jesus fuckin’ Christ. If there’s anything airline passengers DON’T want, it’s unpredictability.
-->Tears of joy and sadness dept: It was a great show. A CD release party. 21 of New York’s best punkrock bands all on NEW YORK SHITTY PUNK ROCK 2005, put out by Attention Punk Records. I got there late, but did manage to see two of my faves: WORLD WAR IX and THE STACKERS, plus a new favorite: BLACKOUT SHOPPERS.
It was a great night, but why all the tears? Especially on those petite and attractive Orientals? It was THE STACKERS last show in the US. Their drummer was deported when caught by a roaming border patrol in Texas. (Expired visa) I guess they were looking for Mexicans. Now, they all decided to return to the rising sun and play there for a while. I’ll miss ‘em.
Oh yeah, I just had a thought. Motto for Calgary, where Jesus died and was… er… resurrected. Land of the Rising Son.
--> Still recruiting dept. The bisexual email list has been too quiet lately. So, it’s time to RECRUIT. If you want to participate in our discussions, send an email to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU. The entire message should read SUBSCRIBE BISEXU-L That should do it. You never know who you’ll meet. And, yes I have, but not often enough.
-->As if you needed another reason dept: Remember when everyone had AOL? Supposedly the company is still the largest Internet provider, but how many people do YOU know with AOL addresses?
Well, for those few, there’s another reason to quit. This edited from the LA Times:
A group of 600 organizations that includes the AFL-CIO and the Gun Owners of America has been circulating an online petition protesting AOL's plans to begin charging extra to route e-mail around its spam filters.
On Thursday, though, the world's biggest Internet service provider blocked e-mails containing links to the petition against the "CertifiedEmail" plan at DearAOL.com.
Yep, AOL reading and censoring your email again. Is it a kind of parental control?
-->Speaking of censorship dept: The entire Internet is under attack by a new law pushed by the big Telcoms. They want to charge a fee to content providers to insure fast and efficient download of their materials. This will destroy the basic equality of the internet and put more power in the hands of a few corporations. (How long before Anti-flag sings against it?)
You can sign a petition against the thing at: www.SavetheInternet.com
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