I’ve been busy finishing Chapter Six: The Gobubbles for Mathematicians in Love. Today’s text is the chapter ending, with a big rocks-off fantasy concert scene with Bela's band Washer Drop playing with metal band AntiCrystal at Heritagist Park, the baseball stadium in SF. The scene relates to the hundred-percent patriotism campaign I was imagining a few days ago.

As long as I'm sinking into political ranting — I heard an intersting rumor after Rumsfeld said that they know where Osama is in Pakistan, but they're not going to do anything about it. To wit: The Chimp sent his personal black helicopter to ferry family-friend Osama to safety from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 2002, so that Osama would be handy for popping out to scare the voters in November, 2004! And that's why they know where he is. They set him up there. Pass it on, and believe everything you see in blogs!

I’m also busy doing my third go-through on the copy edits for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, so today’s graphics are three random images I just corrected in there.

***

[Classified time-lapse photo of the Chimp’s black helicopter!]

“We’ve got a hundred-percent problem in this country,” I yelled into my microphone, my voice booming back at me. “See your future in the bubbles! See what the Heritagists want with their hundred-percent campaign! And, thank you, thank you, thank you, AntiCrystal for letting us play this song! Joe Doakes is — a Hundred-Percent *sshole!” I swung my arms down like a conductor and the bands dug in, K-Jen and Waclaw screaming the lyrics with a classic dreg/metal mix of joy and defiance.

He’s a hundred-percent jerk — Never had to work.

He’s a hundred-percent dumb — Wants all our music numb.

He’s a hundred-percent greed — Robs the families in need.

He’s a hundred-percent rich — He use you for his bitch.

It was a wild ride. Naz and Abdul were pounding the drums in a goose-stepper’s march, Cammy and Jutta were bubbling up fat sarcastic bass notes, Stanislaw was playing a wallpaper of paisley-shapes and I was stabbing rusty triangular knives of ostinato guitar feedback into K-Jen’s stark text.

He’s a hundred-percent war — Our kids are dying for.

He’s a hundred-percent killer — Behind his mansion pillars.

He’s a hundred-percent hate — Stop, it’s getting late.

He’s a hundred-percent pig — Why’d we let him get so big?

We all had mikes, and we came in together on the chorus, with the crowd pumping their fists and roaring the words along with us, over and over again, Waclaw’s hugely amplified voice soaring above it all, barking out the refrain with a quirky passion that made each repetition new.

Hundred-percent *sshole!

Hundred-percent *sshole!

Hundred-percent *sshole!

[Graph of Heritagist popularity.]

Yes, I know the lyrics look crude on the printed page, but forget not the transformative power of rock and roll. Imagine, if you will, thirty thousand people screaming these words at once, and imagine ten thousand Gobubbles floating among them, with each bubble showing a simulated moment of the projected hundred-percent Heritagist administration: truculent Joe Doakes announcing another war in the service of big business, police attacking poor people with clubs, industrial pipelines pouring poisons into rivers, American tanks razing mosques and minarets, hard-guy Frank Ramirez telling FBI agents to shut up, a skyscraper collapsing from a terrorist bomb, peevish Doakes and his marshmallow family hobnobbing with glittering billionaires, a fresh-faced American soldier dying, a hopeless old woman staring into an empty cupboard, pollution-caused cancer tumors swelling from an man's throat, Doakes testily signing another tax cut for the rich — hundred-percent *sshole!

[Your brain on music.]

Backstage we were jubilant, and with good reason. Though we didn’t fully realize it yet, we sensed we’d changed America for good. Before long, whenever a Heritagist politician said their pet code-phrase “hundred-percent” each and every listener would mentally append the word “*sshole,” often as not saying it out loud.

***

Have a good Independence Day. It’s still a free country — but only as long as you remember to use your freedom.

Last night we went to a party for the new office of Monkeybrains, the ISP run by Rudy, Alex, and Rafael. Everyone was dressed up.

Part of the evening’s entertainment was a spoken word performance by local poet Bucky Sinister.

He read from his book of poems, Whiskey and Robots. You can buy the book direct from Gorsky Press with Paypal or from Amazon with a credit card.

I really enjoyed Bucky’s poems, they had a nice Beat/science-fiction sensibility. One of them was about finding dead angels all over town and collecting their halos. Here's three lines:

—

I tried pulling one off, but the head came with it, and this marshmallow fluff crap poured out the neckhole and smelled so bad I thought I would puke.

Dude, that’s NOT how you do it, you said.

You slipped a mirror between the halo and the head and it fell away easily. We filled our bags with halos and left.

—

A great touch, that slipped-in mirror.

I often think of a fairy tale my mother read to me. There's a boy who’s helping the wizard roast the heart of a magic raven. He’s instructed not to taste it, but some hot fat springs onto the boy’s thumb, and he licks it off, and thereby extracts the entire benefit of the raven heart. The boy can understand the speech of plants and animals. The jealous wizard pursues him, but it's easy for the boy to get away, as he's getting advice from the birds and beasts and flowers of the field.

I told this story to my son several times, and at holidays, or even regular family dinners, we often encourage/discourage each other to pinch off the first bit of crisp fat from the food so as to “get all the good from the food and understand the speech of plants and animals.”

By extension this can apply to other dishes, e.g. to pizza or a large salad. It's all about eating the first morsel of the ritual feast.

If plants could talk, what would they say? “Here I am. It's sunny. My roots hold the ground. Soon I'll bloom. Here I am.”

[I got a pig bowl for Father’s Day, too. It’s shy.]

Here’s a satirical passage that I wrote for Mathematicians in Love yesterday. Bela has just arrived at an alternate Earth and is riding in a car with Cammy, a friend of his, native to this alternate world. They turn on the radio. It’s the summer solstice, June 20, and a full moon is rising.

“Oh, this news is gonna be perfect for you, where your head’s at right now,” said Cammy, putting her hand back on the steering-wheel. “It’s gonna seem like you’ve ended up in a sick, weird, evil alternate reality. Feel it, bud, that’s the world we’re livin’ in.”

The show had switched to a tape of Joe Doakes at a recent rally. “In these perilous times, our nation deserves a hundred percent Heritagist government. We can afford no less. Now, I don’t mean to question the patriotism and honesty of each and every member of the Common Ground party. But — if you buy a dozen eggs and one or two or three of them is rotten — common sense says you get your money back and a fresh dozen from the store.” His voice was dry and humorless as a locust’s chirp.

[A moon near the horizon looks bigger to the naked eye than it does in a photo. So I changed it in this photo.]

“What I’m saying is simple common sense,” continued Doakes. “Over and over, the elected and appointed officials of the Common Ground Party have let our people down — in our Congress, in our courts, in our state legislatures, and in our governors’ mansions. I’m proposing a hundred-percent Heritagist victory this fall. We won’t settle for a majority again. We’ve endured the sorry parades of Common Ground filibusters, seen our dreams die in the power-brokered special-interest Common Ground committees, and tasted the lash of the willful, revisionist Common Ground courts.” Doakes was a madman. But each time he stopped, his audience burst into wild applause. Maybe it was a fake applause track?

[The end of the longest day of the year means the slow return of the dark…]

“With complete control of the Congress and the state legislatures, we can use the constitutional power of impeachment to remove the out-of-control Common Ground judges,” rasped the mean little voice. “This is what the balance of powers stands for. With complete control of the Congress and the state legislatures, we will propose and, with the people’s help, pass a constitutional amendment to remove the out-dated notions of Presidential and Congressional term limits. This is what a stable democracy deserves. The success of the hundred-percent campaign will bring lasting homeland security, an end to legislative grid-lock, and an end to the tyranny of the courts. Our great nation deserves no less than the hundred-percent freedom that a hundred-percent Heritagist victory will bring.” The applause crested like a thunderous wave, with the audience members cheering themselves hoarse.