Author: Larry Jones

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Sneak Peek: President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address

I have received an early transcript.

My fellow Americans,

I love my country. I want you to know that during the first four years of my administration I have tried to do the right thing for America and her citizens. We have done our best for this land that we all love, and God bless you, you have been so kind as to send me back here to Washington, to continue to serve, and that’s exactly what we intend to do.

Because you see, my fellow Americans, while we tirelessly worked for the betterment of these United States, and we have been certain of our righteousness, we must now concede that we are human. Mistakes have occurred, wrong assumptions made.

In 2000, I lost the popular vote in this country. A majority of you voted for my Democratic opponent. And yet my party and my lawyers fought this outcome all the way to the Supreme Court, using every bit of legal chicanery at their disposal to take the deciding electoral votes in Florida, a state run by my own brother and whose top election official was the co-chair of my campaign there. My opponent, to head off a potentially disastrous constitutional crisis, graciously conceded defeat when he saw that we would stop at nothing. For these actions I feel only remorse and shame, and I beg your forgiveness.

In 2001 I proposed an enormous tax cut. My financial advisors urged me to call it “tax relief.” I proclaimed “The surplus does not belong to the government. It belongs to the people,” and through the use of a campaign-style publicity blitz, I sold this idea to you, and my party and my advisors rammed it through the Congress. Only then did it become clear that this so-called tax relief amounted to nothing more than payback to the wealthy CEO’s and corporations that have been financing my political career for twenty years and who essentially bought the White House for me in 2000.

My friends, I intend to correct this in my second term. I am proposing a rollback of these huge and regressive tax cuts, and a return to reality-based financing of the federal government. My economic policy up to now has created only more wealth for the already-rich, while hard-working Americans have seen their futures converted to dismal, low-paying fast food jobs. This needs to change, and that’s just what we are going to do. The money from my tax-cut rollbacks will go into real investment in education, job creation and job training, and trying to return to some semblance of a balanced budget.

During my first term in office, the United States was attacked by terrorists. Terrorists who had given every indication of their intentions for years, and who we didn’t bother even to try to disrupt or apprehend. It is to our everlasting credit that we went after them where they lived, that we destroyed their bases in Afghanistan and toppled the government that sheltered them there. I’m proud of what our brave soldiers accomplished there.

But we quit that fight in the middle and we did not capture their leader. Instead we turned to attack another sovereign nation, wreaking destruction on their country and killing an estimated one hundred thousand of their people, while costing the lives of over 1300 of our own, spending over one hundred and fifty billion dollars and destroying the worldwide credibility of the United States.

I sold this war to you, my fellow Americans, with more propaganda and deception. Everyone knows now that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein — bad as he was — had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, and it is to my deep shame that I confess to you now that I knew it all along. We all knew — Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary-designate Rice, even Secretary Powell — but we wanted the war so badly that we were willing to deceive the American public to get it started.

I can’t deny that this war has been good for Halliburton and many friends of mine and the Vice President’s. But, my friends, war is wrong. It’s evil and I will not spend another American life, not one more dollar for the continuance of this killing. I know now that we cannot bomb the world into peaceful democracy. Therefore effective immediately I am ordering my commanders to stand down in Iraq, and to begin converting their operations from death and destruction to humanitarian assistance. We have created a terrible mess in Iraq, and it is incumbent upon the United States to help in whatever way it can to alleviate the suffering and to help restore peace in the countryside and dignity to the Iraqi people. In this effort I’m asking for the support of every American.

My fellow Americans, I admit to you today that there is no “war on terror.” Instead, my administration has waged war on the American Way. Through the Patriot Act and the frenzy that engendered it, through reinterpretation of The Geneva Accord and other international agreements, we have become a nation of torturers, a government that “disappears” people, a power-mad, oil-thirsty imperial bully, a pariah among nations, and I say to you this will not stand! As I speak, arrest warrants are being sworn for the top members of my administration: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condaleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and others. Within the hour they will be in custody, and real investigations will be undertaken to learn the details of their culpability in these corruptions of American ideals.

Which leaves me.

I stand before you, my supporters and detractors, and I say to you “I have sinned.” For the damage I have done, I can expect no les than to be thrown from office, even imprisoned, and if you and the courts see fit to punish me so, I will gladly accept my fate.

I am a lucky man, but I am not a smart man. I was born to great wealth and sent to the finest schools, but I didn’t learn very much. I didn’t understand all that was happening during my first term in office. Until now, I believed that I was ordained by the Almighty to do the things that I have done as your President. Now I only wish for a chance to right the wrongs that I have committed — and I have named only a few of them today. I stand before you humbled and ashamed, and I beg you to let me try. I can’t promise that I will make no mistakes, but I can tell you this: There will be no more deception, no more hidden agendas. I will try my best to lead a government that is truly of and for the people, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, and God bless us all.

***************UPDATE*****************
I heard the speech a little while ago, and apparently he discarded the text above and used something else. Oh, well…
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Programming Note

Tomorrow (January 19) on NPR’s Day to Day magazine show:
“The Perils of Personal Blogging,” The tease has a quote from someone who got fired from his job because of his blog. Check your local listings. We all get National Public Radio, don’t we?
I wish I could get fired. Then I could write more. Did I say that out loud?

******UPDATE******

I heard the segment this morning (hey, it’s Wednesday in L.A.!), and I guess I will have to refrain from talking very much here about my crummy job. It seems a number of folks have lost their jobs, crummy or not, because of their blogs. We are not anonymous, people. It’s an illusion. I know two or three ways my real identity could be tracked down by anyone really serious about it (that’s why I don’t understand why I have not yet heard from Gwyneth Paltrow). I have not tried very hard to hide — just enough so the casual reader won’t bother to figure anything out.Anyway, if you’re in Los Angeles the entire show will be repeated at noon today (Wednesday, 19Jan2005) on public radio station KCRW, 89.9 FM. The segment happens about 28 minutes into the show, and lasts less than five minutes. Or you can go to Day to Day’s web site, and hear the audio after 3 PM EST.And if you think you are hiding yourself real good in your blog, you might want to take a look at The Hot Librarian’s post from yesterday. She got found out, apparently through total coincidence, and she is distraught.

We are not doing anything wrong. We are having fun, making connections, learning about ourselves and blowing off steam. It’s therapy in a lot of cases. Why should we be fired?

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Pigs and Pussies (Bang Bang, Part 2)

Last time I tried this I didn’t solve anything.

The Mystery Dance

I started out trying to explain why a person you’ve just met would go out of his/her way to tell you they are not available, that they are taken, that they are not in the market. This led to my confession that I always took this kind of thing as a personal attack, which got me thinking that maybe I see a lot of women as possible sex partners, and so of course they want to shoot me down, although now I can’t see the logic in this thinking.

Anyway, it should come as no surprise that others are wondering about these and related issues, which can be summed up as

The Mystery Dance: What guidelines can we use
to understand The Game of Love?
How can we tell if the object of our lust is similarly interested in us?

This is so important that if you knew the answer, you could — dare we say it? — rule the fucking world. At least I’m pretty sure I could. Evidently the studliest warrior and the ringin’est belle are not much more enlightened on this subject than anyone else. They may be getting it more than most of us (or, actually, they may not), but they still don’t have a clue how the system works.

I noticed that there’s a guy named Dallas who has a crude theory that he uses to explain everyone’s behavior. His theory is that we all automatically put everyone we meet into a hierarchy of fuckability. All of us do this. To everyone we meet. He states his case in a mildly amusing way, but he’s wrong, of course. Go read about it. Go now, if you like. I’ll wait. Warning: This theory is a little bitter.
**********************************************
Dallas has created an elaborate web site to explain his theory, and give him a hand for all his work. If you don’t want to read all 12 pages of it for yourself, here’s what he says: When a man meets a woman, he subconsciously decides how much he wants to have sex with her, and places her on a rung of his “ladder” in a position corresponding to his desire for her. He’s always looking to get it on with someone as high up on his ladder as possible, and will drop someone lower if someone higher enters his life or becomes available. Women do the same, only they have two ladders. The second one is for guys they like but will never fuck — the “friends” ladder.

Everyone does this, and they make their judgements based on the, er, basest of criteria. Men go almost entirely for physical hotness and sexual availability, and women are looking mainly for guys with a lot of money, although hotness counts somewhat. Oh yeah: anyone who says they are looking for intellectual stimulation, good sense of humor, stability, etc. is just flat out lying.

Personally I think this is kind of a scary way to look at what is, essentially, Life, and I instinctively back away from it. I have jokingly said here that all men are pigs (or maybe someone else said it?), and in a way that statement kind of helps to understand The Dance. It brushes aside nuance and lets us focus on the fundamentals, so we can cope with what’s happening. But I hope no one thinks I really believe there is no nuance or free will in our interactions. I don’t know if there is a sure-fire way to know what that cutie-pie across the room might be thinking about you. You have to try to turn off the filters, let the truth flow into you, and then you have to act on what you think. The chance that you might be wrong is where the excitement comes from. And maybe the hope that you might be right is the reason for living.

Looking at Dallas’ web site, I can see that Dallas (and maybe a few friends), over many cocktails, had a lot of fun putting his ladder theory together and coming up with examples of how it works in real life. But just because you have diagrams, graphs and charts does not make your premise true, especially if the research that generated the graphs comes from one guy’s opinions. I think he should stop theorizing pretty soon, and go out and find a girl.

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My Bad, Part 2

Did I lead off on Martin Luther King Day with a piece on The Beatles?

Not exactly, I guess, because I wrote my Monday morning post on Sunday night. Still, my bad. Let me just say that MLK is one of my lifelong heroes, and one of the most important and inspiring voices of the 20th century. I think his mug should be added to Mount Rushmore. Why do we kill these people?

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She Was Just Seventeen

I was a teenage girl in 1964.

I had a bouffant hairdo. I wore teardrop-shaped black framed eyeglasses, a plaid pleated skirt and knee socks, and when I saw The Beatles on stage at The Ed Sullivan Show, I was transfixed and transformed.
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan
No, I am not transgendered. I just saw a DVD of The Ed Sullivan Show from February of 1964 and September of 1965. This is my way of saying that finally, after forty years, I really saw what those screaming girls saw on those nights.

For three consecutive Sundays in February, Ed presented The Beatles in live stage performances of their earliest hit songs: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Please Please Me,” “Twist and Shout,” and more. The studio audience was made up of hundreds of teenage girls who, at least for those moments, became part of history. For they saw the future in this odd-looking band, and they responded to it so viscerally that America was shocked, and their boyfriends angered and jealous.

I, a musician, didn’t see it. The vocal mix was bad. Their hair was completely out of line. Their pants were too tight. They wore faggy high-heeled boots! None of that mattered. What I didn’t see was the immense talent — songwriting, arranging, singing, playing — but more than that, I failed to see the magic.

Magic doesn’t happen very often, and if you’re an analytical type like I am, and uncomfortable with change as I used to be, sometimes it goes right over your head. The girls in the theater and all over America on those nights were ready for magic, ready to see it and feel it. They screamed, they wept, they held their faces in their hands, they were spellbound. Their reaction looked sexual, and no doubt on some level it was. But really they were reacting to being touched, deep in their souls, in a direct, truthful, fun way that had — dare I say it? — never happened before. The world was changing, and these girls were among the first to notice.

Of course I came to realize that The Beatles were special. Like many millions around the world, I became a huge fan. But this evening, watching this primitive black and white television show, shot with cameras that had vacuum tubes, for God’s sake, I felt the magic, and it nearly drove me to tears. Hey, I have admitted here that I am somewhat in touch with my feminine side. Deal. Watching these performances, I was touched by the magic. I was joyous like a kid, like the kid who watched these shows live forty years ago, only this time I got it.

If you love pop music, and you want to see some roots, get this DVD, and maybe you’ll get it, too.

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Must Have Forgot My Meds

Man, I wish I could just take a pill and be happy.

You think it’s easy being an intelligent, introspective man? Let me tell you, it’s a tough gig. I have to engage in so many activities to keep my mind off the waking nightmares that stalk my mind: tsunamis, neoconservatives, office politics, nepotism, what others might think of me, bills, money, mortality (mine), fear of artistic/financial/social/sexual failure.

In order to avoid dwelling on these things I have to go to movies, make movies, work out, play guitar, build or upgrade a computer every six weeks, make and drink pot after pot of gourmet coffee, telephone friends, write songs, sing songs and jack myself off with this blog (and sometimes without it). Even staying busy at my crummy job gets me through the day.

Sitting idle for more than a few minutes turns my mind inward, and it’s dark in there. I wonder if other people have that darkness, too, and if they’re afraid of it. Is everybody on the treadmills at the gym running from something? (Disclaimer: I don’t go to a gym. I see these people through the windows. The whole gym thing is another post.) Or are they just working out? I wish I knew. I wish I knew if the chaos inside me is inside everybody. Sometimes I’m sure it is, and other times I think I’m the only one.

Most Saturdays I spend completely alone, just me and whatever blows through my mind, so if I’m smart I get a few diversions going. Today I was only half-smart, which is what led to this little outburst. I enjoy most of the activities listed above (except for working and working out — hmm, seems to be some kind of connection there…) but I wonder how I can hit that state of feelin’ alright naturally. High on life, as it were, not evading the demons, just not even fucking knowing about them.

And now for some cheery lyrics by Leonard Cohen:

I’m not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,
but let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.

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Skin

The comments section of the previous post sets a new record for revision99.

I’m sending out love to everybody who is reading it and to all who joined in. I will revisit the topic of pigs and pussies again soon (maybe today), and in the mean time the comments section there remains open.

Readers of those comments will be heaving a huge sigh of relief for me, for themselves, and for the world, as I was almost talked into posting naked pictures of myself. Fortunately, it was revealed to me at the last second that someone was having me on, and a crisis was averted.

I started this thing before the U.S. presidential election of 2004, because I had to say a few things about politics, a subject I am interested in. But I don’t have time to do the research to back up my opinions, what with trying to earn a living and all. Today I heard a columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times on the radio saying he worked as a street reporter for twenty years before he had earned the privilege of stating his opinion in print. And that’s the way it should be. There are too many political pundits today who have never been anything but pundits. They are not seasoned in news gathering and they don’t know what has gone before, so there is not enough depth to their writing. Some of them are good writers, but I think I am coming down on the side of “Make them work for it.” As a corollary, I had to get out of the pundit business, and fast.

I still believe what I believe, politically speaking, and of course I’m absolutely certain I’m right. I mean correct. But putting it down here without being prepared for instant attacks and rebuttals from, like, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, is just blogger suicide. Blogicide. I’d get killed, and then I’d whine, start to cry, become morose and alienated, and, well, we all know how easy it would be for me to get automatic weapons. Nuff said.

So I backed off politics and fumbled around for a few weeks, typing a few things here and there, but mostly becoming obsessed with reading the blogs of others, a pastime that continues to derail all my efforts to be productive in any way. So anyway I’m drifting away from politics and just sort of raving about nothing, trying to be nice so other bloggers will like me, and I am dumbfounded when I come upon a request, nay, a demand, for naked pictures. Go look at the previous comments section if you don’t believe me.

Up to this point the commenters are keeping it real and the commentary is pretty gown-up, considering the subject. I try to counter with a grown-up appeal to enlightenment and intellectual questing, but this commenter, it seems, won’t take no for an answer. Desperate, I start to think how I can satisfy this bizarre demand, as I always aim to please. I don’t have any naked pictures of myself. But I do have a tripod and a camera.

I’m trying to remember how the guys posed in that copy of Playgirl I saw, but I keep thinking of the line the Playgirl art director used when she was interviewed in Rolling Stone. Trying to describe the perfect photo, uh, package, as it were (stimulating yet legal), she said she was looking for “maximum tumescence in repose.” My heart starts to palpitate as I picture my tumescence maximized, but in repose. The picture is not a pretty one. But I think “This reader is challenging me. I am going to call her bluff.”

So I gave in, and I put it in writing — keep watching, and I’ll give you some skin. But as I said above, somebody chickened out, and it wasn’t me. Now she’s trying to act like it was all a joke, but I didn’t see any smilies or anything. On the other hand, thank God she let me in on the joke, before I embarrassed myself and icked everybody out.

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Bang Bang, She Shot Me Down

I may be frisky and flirtatious, BUT I’M TAKEN!

I was reading tonight in the blog of, that’s right, a 30-year-old woman about how she met this other woman who let it be known that she was of the lesbian persuasion. No problem, except that the new girl repeatedly brought up the fact that she was not available, as in “I already have a girlfriend.” One of the comments on this blog (Blogger and Commenter — you know who you are) touched a nerve that I have had exposed for most of my life and that can be summed up as “Waaah! Why are you telling me this? Are you trying to hurt me or ‘get’ me in some way? Are you trying to one-up me or something? Am I such a rotten companion that you don’t even want me to make a try for you?”

To put it another way, it’s all about me.

Yes, I’m that sensitive about my own feelings, and that insensitive to yours. Hey, once you break down and admit you love me (you know you want to), that’s different. Then I am totally in touch with my gentle, poetic side. But in normal social situations, keep your boyfriends or girlfriends to yourself.

Examining this syndrome to a depth that I have never bothered to do before, I see that it is another example of my insecurity and lack of confidence. I mean, maybe I am talking to someone who is exuberant about her loving, committed relationship, and she is merely trying to share her joy with the world, including me. Why would I immediately have to get defensive about it?

The fact that I usually think the “I’m not available” remark, however it’s expressed, is a jab AT me also suggests that I view a LOT of women as potential — say it with me — sexual partners. Maybe I do. Maybe it’s more obvious than I thought it was. I no longer look directly at the breasts when addressing a woman, and I feel like I’m being a gentleman, and I quit that pubic-hair-on-the-coke-can routine right after the Clarence Thomas hearings. But, hey — boys will be boys, and they will be IN YOUR PANTS, girls, if they can. So that’s it: I feel busted, and guilty. As polite as I tried to be, I had filthy intentions, you saw through them and DERAILED MY TRAIN. Caught red-handed trying to follow God’s Plan. Oh, the shame. But I’m feeling better already, having confessed.

You know who I admire? The guys who see all women as potential sexual partners, win some and lose some, and don’t get too fucking mental about it, like I just did. I don’t understand women (You’ve never heard that before, eh?). They have a million ways of shooting you down. I should know by now that I don’t have to make up new ones of my own.

Note to the blogger who got me started on this track: Yowzah! You must be some hot mama! You even make the girls nervous.

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Sex, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll

I’ve only been a blogger for a short time, and I am finding that I enjoy reading blogs more than I do writing them.

Maybe it’s because I am not as clever as I thought I was, and when I re-read my posts I am usually disappointed. Either it’s not funny when I thought it was, or I wandered off the point somewhere in the middle and never got back to it, thus making the whole thing look like a 7th-grade essay, or I just didn’t find the words to say what I meant. I used to have a great vocabulary, but I lost it gradually after coming to the realization that a lot of people had no idea what I was talking about. I started speaking in plain English, and gradually forgot all the big words. See, I don’t even have a big word meaning “big words.” But I used to.

Now that I’m writing on the internet — I should say now that there IS an internet — plain English is not that important. People can look up anything they want — even get it translated from some other language into English. Plain English, if they want. So I don’t have to talk down. I could use all the polysyllabic verbiage and circumlocutory constructions I wanted. But now plain is the only way I can talk. So my blogging is a little, um, boring.

On the other hand, I have read hundreds of other peoples’ blogs, and they are funny, intelligent, well-researched AND they freely use big words that I understand but can never think of when I want to. They are also poetic, god damn them, and dirty, god bless them. Yes, sex blogging: How I love it. The filthy details of randy midwestern housewives’ masturbatory fantasies, and how they become my masturbatory fantasies.

I have noticed that all blogs are written by 30-year-old women. This, I suppose, should not surprise anyone. Who writes diaries? Who are the diarists in your life? Girls, then later women. Enter blogging. Wow! Diaries that others can read, but they are just as private as any journal under lock and key because no one knows who you really are!! So you can keep your secrets while you reveal them. And you can lie about your exciting life and your dates with Brad Pitt or Gwyneth Paltrow and hey — it might be true.

But back to 30-year-old women. OK, they aren’t the only bloggers, but they might be half of all bloggers. When do they find the time to put together these witty, sexy, smart rants? It takes me a week to write five paragraphs, and they are knocking out daily posts, while they raise three children alone, hold down a full-time job, attend law school, read voraciously and pursue two or three potential boyfriends, all of which activity shows up instantly in their blogs. I am ready to submit. Women are truly superior beings. I get it. I humbly request to serve at your feet.

And now, because I read more than I write, I feel like I have all these new acquaintances, people who know me, and I know them, and we chat a little every few days, and we get each others’ jokes, and we are concerned for each others’ emotional and physical health. If someone posts pictures I study them as if they are of my sister’s wedding, and comment on them as if anyone gives a shit what I think of them. Some of the 30-year-old women have man-trouble, and I am right there with my wise advice, which is about as useful as tits on a bull, and I fervently hope no one takes it seriously, or I could have some real liability, but I feel like it’s OK to give advice and if I have a breakthrough maybe I will even ask for some, too, because, you know, I feel like you are all my pals.

Except that you’re not my pals, really, and we really don’t know each other, and I only think I know who I am dealing with because I have — in many cases — accepted more or less at face value who each of my blogging buddies says (s)he is. And this makes me pathetic, I guess. Not that I don’t have any friends in real life. I have lots. Ok, two. But still, I know they would go to the mat for me. How many of you would do that? All right, then.

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