A short list. In no particular order.

We told our children that any child could grow up to be President. And then we made it come true.

We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.

We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.

Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes hues and scents.

We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.

Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.

We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.

We did Levis.

We held the torch high and hundreds of millions came. No matter what the cost.

We saved Europe twice and liberated it once.

We believed so deeply and so abidingly in free speech that we protected and honored and, in some cases, even elected traitors.

We let you be as freaky as you wanted to be.

We paid you not to plant crops and not to work.

We died in the hundreds of thousands to end slavery here. And when that was done continued for a century and a half around the world.

We invented Jazz.

We wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysberg address.

We went to the moon to see how far we could hit a golf ball.

We lifted a telescope into orbit that could see to the edge of the universe.

When people snuck into the country against our laws, we made parking lots and food stands off to the side of the road so they wouldn't get hurt, and we let them use our hospitals for free, and we made their children citizens.

We didn't care what God you worshipped as long as we could worship ours.

We let the People arm themselves at will. Just to make sure.

We gave everybody the vote.

We built Disneyworld. Just for fun.

We had a revolution so successful it was still going strong two and a quarter centuries later.

We had so many heroes, even at the end, that we felt free to hate them and burn them in effigy.

We electrified the guitar.

We invented a music so compelling that it rocked the world.

We had some middling novelists.

We had some interesting painters.

We had some pretty good poets.

We had better songwriters.

We ran our farms so well we fed the globe.

We made the automobile and the airplane.

We let you get rich. Really, really rich. And we didn't care who you were or what you were or where you came from or who your parents were. We just cared about what you made or what you did.

We had poor people who, even at their most wretched, were richer than any other poor people on the face of the planet.

We were the most nobel nation the world had ever known.

We had so much freedom that many of us voted to just throw it all away.

Even towards the end, as we dissolved into the petty bickering and idle entertainments that come with having far too much leisure and money, many among us were still striving to make it higher, finer, brighter, better and more beautiful.

Even towards the end, the best of us declined to give up and pressed on. "Where to? What next?"

More and more Gibbs, as can certainly be seen here, is proving to be the very model of that modern Obama apparatchik; a model updated for our era into the very glass and form of a Little Hitler reigning secure in the White House Dwarf Cavern.

We all know the contemporary type of "Little Hitlers." We meet them whenever we have to interact with people whose positions do not rest upon doing a good job but upon pleasing some master above them. Most often we see them in Government bureaucracies where rules are not announced to you until you break them. At which point you are instructed, in the patient smarmy tones reserved for pre-schoolers, to "fill out the proper form" or "obtain the proper documents," and then come back to wait in the longer line in the next building.

This is essentially what we see oozing out of the Gibbs creature in this clip. The same sort of small bureaucrat smarm packaged in one who has ascended to a status far beyond anything he hoped for while pleasuring himself to pictures of Janet and/or Michael Jackson in his adolescence. Instead he can now pleasure himself by instructing the bought and paid for members of the White House Press Corps to go fuck themselves with any questions he doesn't feel like answering. He knows they aren't going anywhere and so he can just mellow them like a cat playing with a freshly pithed mouse.

At the same time, his posture, expressions, and general body language reveal a man innately convinced of his own self-worth and his position in the heavenly host of anointed Obamaites. There are many of these at all levels of the government now and the only things that can even hope to dissuade or dislodge them are high levels of ruin and rubble.

Behold. The wan and pityingly patronizing smile that flickers and fades. Observe the slight tinge of sanctimony with the tilt of the head. Watch for the momentary lapse into irritation masked by the lidded beagle eyes. Listen if you can to the parrying banter and recall the man who "oozing charm from every pore / oiled his way across the floor."

All of these bespeak the man who knows he is leading whores on a merry chase and is determined that if anyone is put at bay it shall not be him. Gibbs is, as these men go, a serviceable dog; one who has been carefully vetted and trained to be loyal to his masters. He has what it takes -- a willingness to do say anything, to do anything, to perform any service asked of him and to eat any offal that his masters put before him.

Charles Dickens had the measure of these Gibbsian phonies long, long ago. Here is his description of Seth Pecksniff, the "treacherous and hypocritical architect" in Martin Chuzzlewit. when he described this most odious man:

It has been remarked that Mr Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus's purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.

His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr Pecksniff, 'There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me.' So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-grey which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, 'Behold the moral Pecksniff!' [Emphasis added]

All of these Pecksniffian elements can be spread as wide as a peacock's ass in the above clip. They are there to such a degree that you almost feel sorry for the hapless whores of the press corps as they struggle to deal with his vainglory, his vanity, and his now not-so-sly tone of contempt whenever he deigns to speak with them. Almost. But then you recall that for "journalists" like these they have long since sold their right to say "No." And once you've given up the right of refusal you are doomed, like all whores, to just sit still and let anybody in Gibbs' position use you. If you are really committed you'll feign enthusiasm and laugh at his little jokes in the hopes he'll choose to use you more frequently than the other whores. It'll be "good for your book."

When you've sold your bed, you can't complain about who's lying to you in it.

In a land where neuters, unicorn riders, and moonwalking molesters are deified and canonized, we can forget that there are real men still walking the American earth. Here's one. Do you think she was glad to see him?

"A construction worker, suspended from a crane, rescued a woman who fell into the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines Tuesday. A man who also fell into the water died." -- Photo Journal

And then, for the man reaching out his hand, Jason Oglesbee, and the others involved in the rescue, it was back to work on Wednesday, "We have a bridge to build here," the supervisor said as his men went about their business. -- Des Moines Register

Rush Limbaugh: "This represents a successful assault on prosperity."

U.S. job losses spike in June, dampen recovery hopes WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut far more jobs than expected last month and the unemployment rate hit a nearly 26-year high of 9.5 percent, underscoring the likelihood of a long and slow recovery from recession.

BREAKING! The White House today announced that Sir Paul McCartney will open for President Obama's "Happy Days Are Here Again" tour.

Thus it was with this sorry pilgrim, this old and true friend, who called my West Coast retreat from New York this morning, tattered and battered from his bungee date of the previous evening, telling his tale of testosterone-powered urban woe.

He will be distressed that I have related it here, but it is for the greater good I do so. Men, take heed. Ladies are advised to avert their delicate eyes.

So I'm having this telephone relationship with her, see? You know, the kind of relationship where you're doing this long dance to the tune of "Getting to Know You," and its going pretty well.

I mean, I like it the way it is. We don't see each other a lot because of jobs, errands, New York yadda-yadda, and all that sort of thing. But also its neat, unusual, to spend hours on the telephone just sort of chatting away.

I *never* talk on the phone this long with anyone, but she's clever with questions and sort of keeps me blathering away. I don't feel weird about it until after when I notice that she's winkled all this information about me out of me, but I still don't know a lot about her.

She's a reporter type. I keep feeling I'm getting my notes taken, you know. But still I like it. I mean, hey, it's all about me so who wouldn't?

Still, we are really not having enough face time. She's getting all these weird ideas about me -- which just aren't true. Or maybe they are and I don't like being in such total disclosure with a telephone relationship.

Anyway, she's been under a lot of stress -- job, sick loved ones, hangovers, insecurity, the whole mini-catastrophe. She's sounding fried on the phone and I'm getting the 'let me help you' impulse big time. So when she mentions how uptight her body is, I say, utterly innocently, "I know just how you feel. We need a spa night with major shiatsu massages. That'll tune us up."

The next thing that should have gone through my mind was a dum-dum bullet, but sadly that did not happen.

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls,
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"
-- Bob Dylan

The Mark Sanford Media Fornication Festival currently climaxing in day-by-day updates, when not interrupted by ignoring where Michael Jackson parked his detachable penis for decades, instructs us yet again in what our media expects of Republican politicians: pseudo-moral celibacy in thought, word, and deed stretching from the cradle to the grave. Democrats, conversely, are expected and required to use their sex organs in ways that emulate and celebrate either Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, or Barney Frank.

It is of passing interest that the "profession" of "Journalism" itself requires no moral celibacy on the part of scribes ( pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, avarice, and gluttony being required activities for advancement -- Current Champions: Perez Hilton and his life partner Arianna Huffington.) The position of the media/entertainment industry en masse is that none of the seven deadly sins are allowed to be present in a Republican. Conversely, all seven deadly sins must not only be present but be celebrated in a Democrat. But since all this is well known and daily shown, we will let this interest in the media's position pass for the moment. Besides, it is futile since long and continuing research into the activities of our media today has shown, again and again, that you cannot insult whores.

Our sermon for today is "What doth it profit a man to gain the office of dogcatcher or above, if he must bid adieu to his sexuality in late childhood?"

He's one hundred years old and his long hands, once strong, are growing translucent. He does not so much sit in his wheelchair as he is held upright and aslant by straps. Even awake his eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the florescent lights in the roof of the home. His meals of pureed food are spoon fed to him by attendants who speak to him in the tones he once used, long ago, on his infant children. When the drapes in his room are partially opened they reveal a view of a gravel roof, exhaust fans, and the brick facade of the opposite wing of the home. It's not a view but he doesn't mind. His eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the present, and he's gone off on a fishing trip in the summer of 1949 where "Jesus, the fish are thick on the ground." Don't make the mistake of thinking he's not in the here and now, because he'll surprise you now and then. He'll come out for a bit if it is worth it, but it seldom is. And then only for a moment.

He's my mother's brother, my uncle, and his life has now spanned a century. In the year of his birth, 1909, the NAACP was founded as was Tel Aviv while the keel of what was to become the Titanic was laid in Belfast. Taft took over the Presidency from Roosevelt (Theodore) and "Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, became the first woman to drive across the United States." Airplanes were only six years old but the Germans were already working on the anti-aircraft gun. Wisely so since the United States Army Signal Corp Division purchased the world's first military airplane from the Wright brothers in that same year. Not to be outdone, the US Navy decided it needed a central base in the Pacific and thought Pearl Harbor made strategic sense.

In the year of his birth Geronimo died, Barry Goldwater was born, and Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of radio. There's a radio in his room next to his bed but it's never turned on. Neither is the television that hangs from the ceiling and if the phone rings, it's a mistake. But in his mind, there are signals still coming in from elsewhere, from elsewhen, from out there, and if you sit with him quietly, without trying to engage him and without expectation; if you sit with him "where here and now cease to matter" you can sometimes sense where he lives in this his hundredth year.

C. S. Lewis observed “You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” Live long enough and your body slowly betrays you and sometimes takes your mind and soul with it. Many of my uncle's relatives seem to think that's what has happened to him. And perhaps they are correct. Alzheimer's, senile dementia, and other associated afflictions are the terror of the elderly and their families. Indeed, they are the things we fear most about growing old next to unremitting pain from a degenerating disease. As one of my cousins said, "It's about 'quality of life.'

Dementia might well be the overriding problem that afflicts my uncle as he waits in his room with his name on a card in a slotted holder next to the door. It certainly is what we all assume when the elderly become less and less present to us as we perform our dutiful visits. We reintroduce ourselves and then carefully monitor how long they can hold who we are (son, daughter, sister, brother, friend) and measure that against how long they held that knowledge the year before. It is almost always for a shorter time and that calculation distresses us. We call for more care, for more or different drugs. After all, their care is expensive and we need to get the value for money of our aged relatives knowing, at least, who we are for more than five minutes. Their forgetfulness distresses us because it cuts us off from them just when our need to remind them of our love is greatest, and because it is a portent of what waits for us when it is our name on the card in the slotted holder next to the door. Dementia.

Maybe. Maybe not.

I'd escorted my 94-year-old mother from her home in California to her childhood home in Fargo for my uncle's 100th birthday. My mother is still active and present and, all those who know her agree, inspiring. But her knees have betrayed her recently and long flights that change planes in Denver are something that can no longer be done without a dutiful son whose firm motto is: "There will be no falls on my watch."

In the same home, just down the hall from my 100 year old uncle, is my mother's other brother who is 96. He sleeps a lot but still reads, or seems to read, the daily paper. She'd spend time with him too. During those moments I'd sit with my uncle aslant in his wheel chair with his eyes shut against the glare of the lights and the blur of the common room. It was mostly a quiet time but, now and then, he'd speak to the air. He'd say things like, "Well, Barbara, what are we going to do about the tree this year?" and, after a minute or so, "Biggest damn Walleye I ever saw." Fragments and scraps of thoughts. As the poet says, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

It came to me that perhaps we sometimes mistake senile dementia for sanity in the elderly; that we are so impressed with our slivers and crumbs of knowledge about the workings of the human mind we mistake them for insights into the terra incognita of the human soul. It seemed to me, as I sat with my uncle, that maybe what I was hearing from him was a sane man's sane reaction to his circumstances.

If you knew that everyday for the rest of your life, you'd be dressed in diapers and confined to a wheelchair with blurred eyesight in a small brick walled room what would you do? If you knew that at every meal for the rest of your life a woman who talked to you as if you were a baby would spoon three flavors of baby food into your mouth, what would you do? If, opening your eyes, you knew that all you would see would be a bright fluorescent glare and the blurred shapes of dozens of others, mostly women, lolling about in wheelchairs, what would you do? If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do? If you were a sane man, just what would you, at long last, do?

I don't know about you, but I would figure a way out and if that way out was only deeper in, that's where I'd go. I'd go deep into my palace of memories and I'd use all my energy to construct a world inside that was made of the most vivid moments of all the years I'd lived.

I'd be building the world's worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot sand. I'd be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my grandparents' faces pressed against the glass as the first snow I'd ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I'd be with my first wife on my wedding night at the Pierre. I'd be at my job on the better days. I'd be in a taxi in New York going downtown at three in the morning making all the lights. I'd go back to a warm field in a California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young girl heard once and never again. I'd sit in the sun in front of a rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I'd be laughing on the Spanish Stairs or weaving drunk along a cliff road on Hydra under a bronze moon and above a wine-dark sea. I'd be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down at the Seine in the rain. I'd hold my one-year-old daughter over my head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms. Those and a million other rooms in my Palace of Memory I'd visit over and over again until they all ran together in a blur as the train, accelerating, finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and, finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery complete.

More than anything else, I would not be in that room any more than I absolutely had to.

I like to think that is what is going on in the soul of my uncle. It's not only "pretty to think so," but it has the added advantage of possibly being true. Because he is not always "away" but will come out if the moment is right.

When my mother came in to see him the first time and said, "Mac, it's your sister, Lois," he said, without a pause, "Oh, my irritating little sister. How are you doing?" What followed was a pretty lively back and forth until he tired and left again before being wheeled downstairs for his lunch purees.

Then, a few days later, at the hundredth birthday part his family had arranged, the special presentation involved about thirty Barbershop Quartet singers. Both he and my uncle had been half of a barbershop quartet for decades and every Barbershopper for miles around showed up to honor both of them who sat in the front and listened to a cascade of songs. At the end, of course, the singers launched into "Happy Birthday" which was taken up by the 150 other friends and family at the party. The last extended "Youuuuu..." faded and in the moment of silence that came after, my uncle opened his eyes and in a clear strong voice sang, on key, "Thank you all from the bottom of my heart." And then he closed his eyes and left again taking with him, I hope, one last room to add to his palace of memory.

Last Saturday, the denizens of the self-named "Peoples Republic of Fremont" in Seattle celebrated their state religion, paganism, by worshiping the Summer Solstice with a parade. But since, in Fremont, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, they held a parade before the parade. This "opening" parade is officially known as "The Solstice Cyclist Parade." Unofficially it is known at "The Big Bunch of Buck Naked Bozos on Bikes Parade."

Being alerted to this annual "running of the butts" ritual, I thought it my moral duty to attend and document this pre-rutting ritual. At great personal risk, I placed myself in the street in front of this barrage of bikers and bravely clicked away. The results can be seen after the jump.

Warning: If you are offended by several tons of T&A on bike seats, you are the kind of person who would never, EVER, click the continue link. Some of these pictures are NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Still others are NOT SAFE FOR YOUR EYES.

You, yes you, have been warned.

Out of the tsunami of images, videos, rumors and reports that wash over the web during these days of Iranian resistance, this single image of a fleeting moment arrested my attention. Clicking on it will make it larger and allow you to see the expressions of the women closing in on the ayatollah's thugs. And in that flickering instant you will see what all injustice and repression fears from the people it oppresses, the emergence of The Furies.

Always female and dating back to the Age of Myth, the Furies were the agents of Nemesis:

The [Furies] Erinyes often stood for the rightness of things within the standard order.... Predominantly, they were understood as the persecutors of mortal men and women who broke natural laws. In particular, those who broke ties of kinship through murdering a mother (matricide), murdering a father (patricide), murdering a brother (fratricide), or other such familial killings brought special attention from the Furies.

The woman directly confronting the turning thug is especially revealing. She wears glasses and is certainly not the sort that one would think capable of bravery or violence. And yet she raises a bare hand high as if to strike this man who outweighs her and is certainly schooled in torture and murder by the regime. Behind this courageous woman come others also determined, also outraged, also, in a word, furious.

What happened after this moment? We cannot know unless the rooftop photographer can be found and we can see the other frames that came after. The goons could have turned on the women and beaten them. The goons, seeing themselves outnumbered and others arriving in the background, could have retreated to beat and kill another days. All we have now is this instant and the history that will ripple outward from it, for better or worse, in Iran over the coming days and months.

What we do know is that once you can see, in an image such as this, the emergence of The Furies in the Mesopotamian realm that gave them birth in the Age of Myth, their harsh mistress Nemesis hovers above them. And while The Furies are vengeful, Nemesis is remorseless.

All Islamic tyrannies fear their women. Here you can see the reason why.

Year upon year in this world's dark woods,
Heaped at the foot of the trees,
The tangles and bundles of dead brush increase
Which sunlight shall never seize.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

The ash that descends in the clearest of skies?
The leapers that swam down the stones?
Best answered by bombs from mid-heaven at prayer
With the fire which hollows the bones.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

If their gods decree war, God's war shall prevail.
His lessons are seared in the stone.
No dreams shall defer, nor wishes erase,
The hate that is burned in the bone.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

Only by fire is fascism finished.
This sin is demanded that your line may live.
Only through fire is freedom reborn.
Each generation pulls the sword from the stone.

As the fascist government of Iran begins the massacreof its unarmed citizens today, the world slowly, fitfully wakes to the reality of what it means to have a weakling in Washington.

This report from Britain's Telegraph sounds the first note (The Iranian election: Barack Obama’s cowardly silence :: Nile Gardiner) but it will be far from the last:

The Obama administration's response to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent election victory is cowardly, lily-livered and wrong. The White House's refusal to officially question the result or even condemn the brutal suppression of opposition protestors, is undermining America's standing as a global power, and is little more than a face-saving, cynical exercise in appeasement that will all end in tears.

I'm wrong on so many things so often that I usually take extreme pleasure in being right on the few things I do forecast. But I take no pleasure in this observation from last October:

"When I was a boy I had a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye"
-- Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

The inscape of our world is always with us, omnipresent; a third that walks beside us. We are the ones who shut it out, who lose the thread when tangled in the web of daily events, who forever forget that we can always remember.

To live always in the light, in the presence of the now is something that is perhaps only possible for saints, as it is, for brief moments, available to poets. The power and

[Note: If I ran the zoo, this would be the outline of my foreign policy. From June, 2008.]

Greetings Earthlings!
It has come to our attention that we haven't really been at the top of your Christmas list for some time now. Like some spouse that has become too used to having her good life paid for by a husband's work and sweat, you've decided you "need your space."

And we are here to give it to you. Politely if possible, but with both barrels if necessary. So pay attention....