Monday, February 13, 2006

i fought the war, I fought the war but the war won

First, go here. If you have a slow computer, go elsewhere, and wait fifteen minutes while the Quicktime downloads. this little song and the three minute video with the cheap effects says everything I’ve been trying to say on this blog for a year. Better.

2. This, from the NYT business section:
Iraq War’s Virtues May Be Debatable. The Profits Aren’t.

In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush called for the nation to back the war in Iraq and to "stand behind the American military in this vital mission."

No matter how one feels about this particular conflict, war always has winners and losers — on both sides. There's the human toll, of course, which Mr. Bush acknowledged. Whether democracy and freedom will, over all, be winners, only history will divulge.

But some indisputable winners are clear now: military contractors. Suppose an investor were endowed with that golden instinct for spotting bargains and bought 100 shares of each of the top six military contractors at their lows of the last six years — lows reached by four of them in March 2000, before the election, before Sept. 11 and before any hint of war. That basket of shares would have cost $12,731.50. On Friday, it would have been worth three and a half times that: $44,417.
In the table the NYT lists the top military companies:

Boeing, 2.6 billion dollars profit, up 37.4% from 2004
Lockheed Martin, 1.8 billion dollars profit, up 44.2 % from 2004
General Dynamics, 1.5 billion, +19.1%
Northrup Grummen, 1.2 billion, +29.2 %
etc.

3. There is a mysterious type of music. It is hard to make, although it seems easy to make. It requires a lot of noise. It sends me into nihilistic rapture. Listening to this music, I both want to commit suicide and want to commit suicide again – which, in an odd way, makes the music life affirming. After all, you have to be alive to enjoy your own suicide.

4. Given my exhaustion with the world at the moment – do I live in some richer version of Idi Amin’s Uganda? Do I live in the Monster hospital? As the world is made visibly worse to feed the insatiable greed of upper class gangbangers, and as we tilt towards the environmental terra incognita of a planet without ice (enjoy these storms, Northeasterners), is there any justification for any of it? The laughable freedom. The on the road and through the ozone layer lifestyle. And the brute fact that a thing, a state, is spending as much money on war every year as was generated by the entire world in 1890. I think this song gets that across. We live both in hell and paradise at the same time. But as hell’s upper echelons direct things, year after year, paradise is disappearing before our eyes. If only… if only I were a genetic engineer, and were able to develop a bacteria that I could slip to the stockholders of the largest military companies. This bacteria wouldn’t hurt them. It would just make everything they smoked, drank and ate taste like human blood. My own little chanson de Maldoror.

5. I used to be in a band. In Santa Fe, in the early nineties. My roommate Melanie and I found a sultry sexpot, S., with a raspy, little girl voice. Mel taught her lover to pound the drums – we all loved pounding the drums. Mel was the only real musician, and had been in several punk bands. Me, I wrote the lyrics and did the styling of the songs with Mel, who played guitar. Our band played in clubs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe until Mel wanted to go to a bigger scene: Chicago. Myself, I didn’t want to commit myself that much. I wanted to go to NYC.

So Mel, if you ever come across this silly blog, check Metric out, man! This is just what we envisioned – as dark as classic NIN (which I wanted back then -- not realizing Trent Reznor was going to become a therapy groupy) with just a hint of that underlying Breeders’ sweetness. Sorry it didn't happen.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, monsieur, you are right about everything but too prone to despair. After all, Brownie's thin-skindedness and belief that you must try to please whoever you are around at any given moment was impeded only be his inability to recall that when he called Crawford there was Hagin on the line, but Bush? not sure. Might get it more than just up the arse for that one. Other than that, Brownie is rolling over in the most endearing way--the first really public Republican diarrhea attack we've seen.

Elsewhere in Texas, the press is doing a superb job. Corpus Christi breaks the Cheney buckshot spraying story and there's only one day of delay till it reaches the big papers! It was no worse than when he told someone to go fuck themselves! He had ambulance detail in tow prepared for heart attacks!

And you are not still glowing from the Grammy Festival? There's Valentine's Day Tuesday. Both you and the NYT told me to enjoy this absurd tendency to break yet more records, so that it's already warming the snow into puddles even in the shoveled parts. I always believe what I read. I always have. Anything that can appear neatly typed instead of handwritten must be true. And whiskey is good for you if it is packaged neatly. No different from salad. In fact, it's better because more symmetrical.

Anyway, one's obsessions are surely the thing to look back on as one's life. The point is to remember them and then re-launch them, because it's good to be a narcissist. If I hadn't needed to rent out my bedroom to an adorable modern trollop, you could come up and play with me.

Roger Gathmann said...

Patrick, you are in fine form today!

It must be nice in NYC -- definitely the weather for leaving Steppenwolf tracks in the snow.

Myself, I am not in despair, simply in a high state of exasperation. It is like some grievance slipped into my blood five years ago and it won't let me go. I do not want to write about the Bush culture anymore, but, but -- I go to the papers and a subtle change comes across Doctor Roger's features. They coarsen. The hands become like claws. The voice roughens. The hair gets animal tufty. Is it? Yes, it is Doctor Hyde, who seizes the keyboard and writes another tiresome screed.

Seriously, unlike Camus' Sisyphus, who learned to love his boulder's every facet, I'm so bored with the U.S.A., my own fucking rock, which has usurped other, better things to write about, that I need serious primal therapy or something.

On the bright side, Metric will be appearing in Austin at Stubbs March 14. Unless I have a heart attack, I'm going. My primal therapy.

Anonymous said...

You're genetic engineering line is my new sig line at Cyburbia, roger. bravo.

From the Holodomor to Gaza: NYT softfocuses on famine - the spirit of Walter Duranty lives!

  When Gareth Jones, a former secretary of David Lloyd George, made a walking tour in Ukrainian agricultural districts in 1933, he wrote a s...