Somewhere Between Humor And Tossing Your Cookies

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

There is not much humor in the news today—unless you’re watching Newt Gingrich turn himself into President P.T. Blowhard or Representative Michele Bachmann rage between Cruella De Ville and Maude Frickert. If I hear Jesse Jackson say “Keep Hope Alive!” one more time I may toss my cookies. But we have to keep humor alive or we may all go stark raving mad. Russian poet Yevgeny Evtushenko (one of my favorite guys) describes how indestructible humor is in his poem “Humor”:

“Tsars, Kings, Emperors, sovereigns of all the earth, have commanded many a parade, but they could not command humor. When Aesop, the tramp, came visiting the palaces of eminent personages ensconced in sleek comfort all day, they struck him as paupers. In houses, where hypocrites have left the smear of their puny feet, there Hodja-Nasr-ed-Din, with his jests, swept clean all meanness like a board of chessmen! They tried to commission humor—but humor could not be bought! They tried to murder humor, but humor thumbed his nose at them! It’s hard to fight humor. They executed him time and time again. His hacked-off head was stuck on the point of a pike. But as soon as the mummer’s pipes began their quipping tale, humor defiantly cried: ‘I’m back, I’m here!’ and started to foot a dance. In an overcoat, shabby and short, with eyes cast down and a mask of repentance, he, a political criminal, now under arrest, walked to his execution. He appeared to submit in every way, accepting the life-beyond, but of a sudden he wriggled out of his coat, and, waving his hand, did a bolt. Humor was shoved into cells, but much good that did. Humor went straight through prison bars and walls of stone. Coughing from the lungs like any man in the ranks, he marched singing a popular ditty, rifle in hand upon the Winter Palace. He’s accustomed to frowning looks, but they do him no harm; and humor at times with humor glances at himself. He’s everpresent. Nimble and quick, he’ll slip through anything, through everyone. So—glory be to humor. He is a valiant man.”

Living in the most complex time in history demands that we have the relief of humor, whether irreverent, irrelevant, or revealing. We know we live in perilous times when comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are ala Walter Cronkite, the most trusted men in America. Here we are, in an age with thousands of experts in thousands of different disciplines, all seeking their 15 minutes of fame by ricocheting their ideas around the globe instantaneously on the divinely inspired and devilishly designed Internet. Knowing what happens around the world in seconds guarantees we are going to have constant trouble in river city.

Perhaps Life Is Just One Big Reality Show

There is not much humor in the Charles Manson story but what Charlie said the other day did bring me a smile from the depths of his personal horror. In the late 70’s Manson led a Southern California cult that, according to the jacket of a book describing his life’s story, “blindly followed a leader who led them first into a continuous orgy of indiscriminate drug taking and promiscuous sex.”  (Want more? Read “Witness To Evil” by George Bishop.) And then Charlie led it to the murders of eight people, including the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate. (Yes, that Polanski, who gained fame for seducing teenage girls and directing movies—-in that order.)

The 76-year-old Manson has been in jail for the Tate murders for forty years and usually is heard only when he is up for parole. Parole is always denied because Charlie still has a visible Nazi swastika on his forehead and sometimes acts fruit-loop crazy. But he has been busy studying global warming in his climate-controlled cell and has become the founder of ATWA (All The Way Alive). Charlie granted an interview with Spain’s version of Vanity Fair and said we are all in danger from global warming: “Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar ice caps are melting because we are doing bad things to the atmosphere. The automobiles and fossil fuels are destroying the atmosphere and we won’t have air to breath.”

I think it’s hilarious that here is a rambling madman locked in his cell with a brain permanently washed by most drugs known to man who understands the science behind global warming better than the entire Republican Caucus in Washington!

Things That Tickle My Coccyx

:: I see Minnesota Republican Representative John Kline is sponsoring legislation to remove Ulysses S. Grant’s picture from the $50 bill and replace it with Ronald Reagan’s. I guess it’s supposed to be a tribute to the great budget-balancer who never balanced one and to a compulsive, greedy conservative who added about $2 trillion to our national debt.  I would think that the tsunami of greed with which Reagan flooded our society would be best represented by placing his picture on a new $10,000 bill instead of a $50. Then only his supporters and friends would be wealthy enough to carry them.
:: The recent storms in North Carolina, Alabama, and Missouri have removed two cliches from my reportorial list.  A NC farmer reported that a Class Four tornado picked up his cows and pigs and took them for a wild ride in the sky. Out of respect, we should no longer use the phrases “When pigs fly” or “The cows jumped over the moon.”  They just did.
:: No wonder we have so much trouble with Al Queda-riddled Pakistan. It is such a mess.  A Pakistani newsman says Pakistanis have been traumatized for the past 35 years, suffering through the Afghan jihad, the Kashmiri jihad, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, suicide bombings, and massive floods. He adds: “The question is not ‘Who is mad?’ The question is ‘Who is not mad?’” A recent study may indicate why. With 185 million people Pakistan has only 350 psychiatrists.  We have at least that many with offices on the Upper West Side in New York City alone. I wonder what that says about our country?
:: An interesting little story about language in Atlantic magazine. In Kentucky a “schmuck” is–-well–-a “schmuck.”  But when Sister Mary Schmuck left Kentucky for the Sisters of Mary Convent in Brooklyn, New York, a section that has great Yiddish influences, she had some trouble assimilating. Many people thought she was putting them on. Yiddish, which is a language derived from German and Hebrew, defines “schmuck” as “the dirty male part.”  In German “schmuck” means “jewel.”  Here Yiddish gets even more complicated. A small boy’s penis is called a “shtekl” (a “little stick”) which turns into “shmeckle” when he gets a little older–and then to “schmuck” when he gets a lot older.

Sister Mary Schmuck, trying to get to the bottom of this “schmuck” business, has found there were 400 other “Schmucks” in the U.S. at one time. Now she can’t find any except her own family. I would guess the Yiddish definition is quite well spread.

Daddy, Haven’t We Won The War Yet?

There is very little humor in war except for the cartoons of Bill Mauldin and general officers trying to put a fresh face on it at press conferences. It looks as if the Afghanistan War will be as hard to get rid of as humor is in Evtushenko’s poem. I’m convinced we lost the war about eight years ago when the Northern Alliance druglords, bought and paid for with Pentagon cash, drove the Taliban into Pakistan for us. At that point we should have declared victory and come home, but stupidity, the BEST CONGRESS MONEY CAN BUY, and corporate war profits from the sale of military equipment stood in the way.

Oh, the Russian generals who led the fight in Afghanistan warned us over and over. They said: “Of course you can bomb the Afghans back to the Stone Age in a week. But you will come crawling out of the mountains in ten years with your tail between your legs.”  How prophetic the Russians are. When Florida “Pastor” Terry Jones (He and his family actually run a used-furniture business, forcing some in his “congregation” to work in it) burnt a kerosene-soaked Koran in a ceremony, over 20 people were killed in retaliation in Afghanistan for the event. Jones is known for his ties to the Westboro Baptist church of “Pastor” Fred Phelps and his benevolent family. Jones is also known for being a classmate back in Missouri of that eminent climate-change scientist Rush Limbaugh. Rush must have taught Jones and Phelps how to tie half their brains behind their backs.

A color picture in Time magazine of thousands of Afghan men celebrating the burning of Jones in effigy struck my funny coccyx. Practically every man was photographing the burning with a cellphone or digital camera.  The Afghans are winning their war with us with IEDs, old AK-47s, and camel-driver guile—-while we are piloting armed drones from a Vegas office while eating lunch. Bill Mauldin would have had a field day.

The Battle Between The Rich And Poor Continues On The Battlefield

I don’t believe any of our armchair pundits who think we have a chance of “winning” something, whatever it is, in Afghanistan. We will go broke first.  David Cloud of the Los Angeles Times recently wrote about an incident with Afghans in two SUVs and a pickup truck that reminds me of that great Peter Sellers’ movie “The Mouse That Roared.”

At sunrise one of our Predator drones started to track three vehicles as they were coming over the mountains in central Afghanistan. A Predator runs about $4.5 million. An Air Force pilot based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada flew the Predator, moving the joystick back and forth as if playing a video game. He also was in contact with a nervous Special Forces unit on the ground about 3.5 miles away from the vehicles. That unit felt it might be attacked by men in the vehicles. At one time the vehicles stopped and the passengers took out blankets, kneeled toward Mecca, and said prayers.

But its tough to see what kind of people were praying from three miles up through a video camera. Other American planes were contacted to keep track of the tiny convoy.  An AC-130 ground attack plane was dispatched. That’s the one with the Gatling-type cannon that can fire 6,000 rounds of 20 mm. in a minute. It costs $190 million when there are no cost overruns. The Nevada Predator pilot decided to call up Air Force “screeners” based at Okaloosa, Florida to see if those video analysts looking at high-definition TVs could evaluate the Predator video feed to see if the Afghans were Taliban. The analysts thought they saw rifles in one of the vehicles.

In the immediate area, teams of military linguists were monitoring cellphone calls and radio transmissions, translating them for the other watchers. The decision was made to attack the three white vehicles. Two heavily armed Kiowa attack helicopters at $14.8 million each were ordered to join in the attack. Two Hellfire missiles at $68,000 each destroyed the first and third vehicles in line. The helicopters soon took care of the second vehicle.

But our Pentagon boys and girls who spend more money on offensive and defensive weapons than the rest of the world combined made a lot of mistakes in this confrontation. No Taliban were present. There were no rifles in the vehicles. We claim we killed 15 or 16 men and wounded 12, including a woman and three children. Afghan tribal elders claim we killed 23, including two-year-old and three-year-old boys. We paid survivors, if any, $2,900 each. Families of the dead received $4,800 each. I suppose three used trucks in Afghanistan could be had for $30,000.  We used $225 million in equipment and hundreds of thousands of dollars in military and civilian pay to lose face in this incident.

Before we continue this ridiculous war we should send the administration, Congress, and the Pentagon generals to the thousands of New York psychiatrists for analysis.

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