My views on politics, life, death, the army, and other things too miscellaneous to mention here. This is a personal blog. This blog is 100% factual.
Bill Duckwing
Poet, Author, Journalist
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"There are some myths and untruths surrounding the role God plays in our daily lives. To say that religion and politics do not mix, is certainly a myth, unless you ask a liberal. Anything that affects a Christian (and voting is one of them) — enters into the religious realm. Trying to separate the two is like trying to separate oil from a glass of water, it's impossible to do. "
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Monday, September 19, 2005
Having Fun in DC!
For those who live in the DC area and have never heard of Lyndon Larouche...uh, I don't know, man. I guess you probably don't live in the DC area.
Frankly, I'm astonished by how little attention the Larouche cult gets played nationally. We still like to make fun of Scientologists, and the Mormon church, and I guess a few other cults nationally, but overall, our attention and derision towards cults in America is at a pathetically low tide from our peak in the 70's. Remember the Moonies, or the Hare Krishnas? I do.
But Lyndon LaRouche really is an amazing thing. He's headquartered in Leesburg, VA, and he never allows us to forget it. Nominally a Democrat, he's also nominally a felon, having served time for attempting to avoid paying his taxes. His cult is full of unbelievably naive leftists, who, having never heard of him, become entranced by his calls to hate Bush and Cheney, and love...Lyndon LaRouche. His last national headline was during last year's Democratic primaries, when one of his cultists asked Howard Dean what he thought of Lyndon LaRouche. I don't know why, I guess he was hoping Dean was going to tap the Larouche club and name LL the VP right there. Dean shot back, "Lyndon Larouche, isn't he still in jail?"
Anyway, I was accosted by at least 20 Larouchites and a choir of at least 10 or so more outside of the Farragut North Station this evening. Traveling up the escalator, my first thought was that it was just a simple but very off-key choir with no overt political overtures. Glancing to my left, I saw the long unrolled corpse-white sheet of paper held up before them, and the blue and red scrawled hand-painted slogans written upon it, and I knew instantly that they were in league with Lyndon LaRouche.
Suddenly, they pounced. Twenty hands outstretched before me, each holding more than twenty dozen newsletters. Screaming at me. "Hell is here!" "The Bird Has Flown the Coop!" "Bush is the Devil!"
I knocked their arms away, in an almost futile and desperate to make my way to the curb to cross the street. A girl tries to entice one of my commuters next to me.
"Hey, have you heard that the world economy is collapsing?"
"Seems to be doing all right to me..." he says in a condescending tone. In my head, I think of what I would like to say to that, but get distracted by a high-pitched scream as we leave the curb to cross the street.
"CHENEY GOES TO HELL!!!!!" some cultist screams, in his best Charlton Heston impression, and it truly sounds infernal, like he had just opened a portal to Hell somewhere on the corner behind us, to whine at us for not picking up one of those goddamned newsletters.
I won't go into too much detail beyond this encounter to convince you that not only is Lyndon LaRouche insane, but his followers are the most aggressive, annoying propaganda pushers in the DC area. And I mean, this is DC, where any lunatic with an agenda can go shout their diatribes 200 feet away from the White House.
They want to build some sort of trans-continental land bridge, for instance. Their reasons, of course, are obscure and academic. They also really want to convert our monetary system to the gold standard, because the system we now have in place will collapse and destroy us all if we don't. They also hate the Jews, which figures as a prime element in their theories on why nothing but the gold standard will suffice, because it's...oh, fuck it.
I'll also note that, as a somewhat loyal Democrat, I found myself voting Republican for the first time in a major political race thanks to Lyndon Larouche. Republican Sen. John Warner's last Senate race in Virginia found him up against some Libertarian, and a LaRouche Democrat. I held my nose and voted for John Warner. Thanks, Lyndon LaRouche!
-duckwing, at 10:11 PM
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Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Revisiting the Soap Box
I actually spent quite a bit of time in the first couple of months of my blog quoting Charlie Daniels and his soapbox. I do sort of understand his politics, in a way. My politics, until I got into college at least, were mostly rooted in populism. I made the assumption that governments are established to serve the common people, and that if the people can be kept informed by a fair media, democracy can only facilitate a responsible and fair-minded government.
 Despite his apparant insanity, Charlie Daniels' politics has always been rooted in populism, which is why I do sometimes sympathize with his batshit insane rantings. He was a fun sort of read, back in 2003 when we were merely trying to figure out whether to praise or dump on the Dixie Chicks.
And I wasn't the only person to pick up on this. Democratic Underground wrote a crazy ass 15 page letter to urge Charlie Daniels to change his stripes. I'm not going to dig the link up for you, but basically, they picked up on Charlie's "man of the people" posturing, and urged him that if he really meant that, he should become a Democrat.
Despite being an avid reader of the Soapbox for a couple of months, I honestly haven't read it in over 2 years. The reason I revisited it was because I was reading an interview that Tom Lehrer did with the Onion, basically saying that our politics had become too terrible for satire. Lehrer said that he wanted Bush vaporized, not satirized, as if he was such a detestable person that satirization of him would almost be a homage. I guess I should point out here that Lehrer is an old man now, and he had decided that Nixon was too much for satire thirty years ago, too. He preferred lampooning guys like Eisenhower, someone I don't think I've ever really contemplated before, besides the fact that I know that he was the President at one point.
 Generally, he makes the point that it is impossible to lampoon evil actions or evil people. You can poke fun at John Wayne, because he was representing a machismo that, if you don't just totally blow it off, can be subtly knocked for the silliness it really is. Lampooning Hitler, or the Holocaust, is pretty much impossible. In a way, a lampoon is a glamorization, because you're inadvertantly drawing attention to it. You're saying -"Hey, guys! Look at this stupid thing!" -in a clever enough way to get peoples attention. Lehrer didn't think that there was anything particularly interesting about a comic saying, "Hey, look at this! A Fucking Portal into the Soul of Hell!"
While I don't agree with his opinion, he may be right. After all, he's well into his seventies now, probably one of the most brilliant satirists of the last hundred years, and insanely intelligent. It pains me now to write a satirical post here on Bush anymore, because there really isn't much to poke fun at, and most of the people who would 'get it' really aren't in a joking mood about President Bush anymore. A better target is John Roberts, because more people seem to be giving him the benefit of the doubt. For satire to be persuasive, it has to antagonize people who generally would be on your side anyway. If you're a liberal, your satire has to mildly antagonize other liberals. For conservatives, well, I'm not really sure if conservative satire actually exists. But best of luck, guys!
Anyway, I liked doing satire on Charlie, because I think he falls a bit more on the stupid side, rather than the evil side of being. He was also a very easy target to work my chops on. Still, no matter what quantity of vomit he pours over onto the pages he has written, I figure he's got a heart. A sick, palpitationous artery-clogged heart. But still a heart.
Anyway, I guess the biggest reason why I checked up on the Soapbox, was because I was thinking, hey, maybe Charlie Daniels, a target of quite a bit of satire on the net, would say something unpredictable.
And well, even by Lehrer's definition, satire is quite alive and well in America today.
“It’s his fault!! It’s her fault!! It’s their fault. The President should have acted sooner, the Governor should have called out the National Guard, the Mayor should have given the order to evacuate the city.” The big scramble is on as officials, celebrities and publicity hungry politicians, aided by a mercenary media scramble for face time and photo ops. I have just one thing to say. You people disgust me beyond description. Who cares whose fault it is? What difference does it make to a crippled old lady stranded in the attic of a house with water up to the eaves? Do you think your snide and totally unproductive comments make any impression to a man with five children to feed and not even knowing where even their next sip of clean water is coming from? There’ll be plenty of time down the road for you people to preen and posture in front of the cameras and tell the world how compassionate you are and how you think heads should roll for one flimsy reason or another But no!!! You’d rather try to make political hay than to unite with the rest of us and help the situation.
I don't even know what he's talking about. But thank you, Charlie Daniels. You will always warm my heart, so long as you can acknowledge that there will be plenty of time in the aftermath to preen and posture in front of the cameras!
-duckwing, at 8:38 PM
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Monday, September 12, 2005
G. Gordon Liddy Was Really Cool
You'll notice I use the past tense, there. Was, not is. It's a pretty important distinction, because God knows what the hell happened to G. Gordon Liddy since Watergate. For all I know, he could be a balding senile communist distributing literature to college students out in Oklahoma, or maybe your typical couch potato who replays the Kennedy assassination over and over again on his VCR. Back...and to the left.
But I don't want to cheapen Liddy's coolness by indulging in mindless conjecture. My point is that nothing he could possibly be doing now would make a heap of a world of difference to tarnish the image and ideals he represented in the 1970's. Liddy was Cool.
I met him just a few months after my tour in Vietnam, which probably dates me back to 1968. I was the war correspondent for the District Examiner at the time, which along with the Washington Post and the Washington Star, was one of the three top daily newspapers in the city. To go off on a tangent, I remember dispatching this piece over the wire for the DE a few weeks before I was shipped back to the states:
A Question of When
By: William Duckwing
SAIGON: As people become more and more
uncomfortable with a war that seems to have
been extended beyond anyone's wildest
imaginations, soldiers too have begun to ask
difficult questions. Difficult questions that nobody
in authority seems to have an answer for. Saigon
has become a city of people looking for answers.
"Where are we going home?" one distraught soldier
asked a couple walking home on the street.
"When are we going home?" another soldier asked
them a little further down the road.
"When are we going home?"
If they could, they'd probably ask President Johnson,
and his successor, the same thing.
'When?' is big question of the moment. Not only for the
United States, but for the World.
I was glad G. Gordon Liddy was hanging out around airport the night I returned to DC, otherwise I might never have gotten my head straightened out.
He approached me innocently enough. I was standing at the baggage claim, when he just sort of slinked over to me and asked me, "Do you like crackers?"
Nervous, I asked him to repeat the question.
"Do you like crackers?"
"I don't know, I guess it depends of the kind of cracker." I said
"Because, you know, 'The Capitol Scene' gives them out for free, you know? Crackers..." The Capitol Scene was one of the restaurants located inside the airport.
"Hey," he said, patting down my arm. "How'd you like to go grab a drink over at The Capitol Scene?" He raised his famous thick eyebrows at me, I guess in an attempt to convince me.
So I got my baggage and we headed over the restaurant. We developed a quick friendship, over a couple of beers many bowls of crackers. He confided in me that he only drank beer, as liquor was "something the assholes drank."
We maintained our friendship over the Watergate scandal, despite the fact that my journalism won the District Examiner a Pulitzer, and Liddy ended up doing some time in the pokey.
To refresh you memory, here are some headlines of stories I wrote for the Examiner:
"Strange Apparitions Appear Inside the Watergate, Arrests and Bugs"
"Secret Slush Fund Analogous to an 'Administrative Game of Chess'"
"Nixon Sacrifices Queen for the Mate. That's what we call a 'Checkmate,' Washington Post."
"Oh, What the Hell? Et tu, Dean?"
In fact, you've probably already figured it out if you've read this far, if you remember that movie they made about my impossible struggle to get a fair and balanced account of what the Watergate scandal essentially boiled down to. To get my account, I used an anonymous source, a man with high connections in the FBI and the White House, that I had originally noted as "MF" for "my friend," but Managing Editor Arthur Abernathy, of the District Examiner, began calling him "Green Door," after the popular Marilyn Chambers movie, "Behind the Green Door," just to spite me. And the name just kinda stuck. The fact is that I never would have been able to get the stories I did without the confirmations from Green Door. He was the most important source in getting the Watergate story, but I've kept his secret now for over 30 years because I believe in source confidentially. But anyway, yeah, Green Door was G. Gordon Liddy.
Sorry, G.
Edit: Sorry, I really just phoned this in at the end. One of the reasons I don't blog that often is that writing things like this, as short as they are, often consume my entire evening. I guess I could hold it and write it out over a couple of days, but I'm impatient when I have an idea, and I think that would kind of defeat the purpose of a blog. Blogs are susposed to be spontaneous, right?
-duckwing, at 9:54 PM
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Friday, September 09, 2005
The Ultra-Ergomatic Ergomagical Ergomystical Mega-Comfort Keyboard Solar System!
"Ergocentric, Manic, and Controlled by External Powers!"
 The multitudes are nothing but work-dulled sheep, content with their standard-issue keyboards, but you are a unique and important individual! The Ergonomically-powered Mega-Comfort Keyboard has been contoured and programmed by our mastermind power-mongers to provide you with a complete and totally adjustable flexi-keyboard, programmable to suit an infinite number of your needs and complaints! For you, and you alone, it is done!
Our special robot moderator at our corporate headquarters in Mind-Fuck Control Alpha, Easter Island, will establish a micro-speed laser mind connection with you, the user of the Mega-Comfort Keyboard, to guide your own hands in designing the Ultimate Ergonomic Keyboard of your dreams. Never experience mental anguish again, only the simple "coarse" manual strain of working with your own hands!
The Ultra-Ergomatic Ergomagical Ergomystical Mega-Comfort Keyboard Solar System is endorsed by the Institutional Agency of Ergonomcial Needs and Growth, and features the ability to:
-enjoy such total comfort that you will never actually sleep again!
-compress your keyboard into a micro-machine a few millimeters in area, or expand it into an inputational powerhouse oceans of miles wide and deep. It seriously makes no difference!
-break the keyboard into an infinite number of sections, each independent and fully-functioning without the other parts. Want at least three keyboard sections that exist only to type the letter "Q" -how about three hundred? Whatever is ergonomically most ergonomical to your needs, your wish is our command!
-have the Numeric keypad removed from the base console and moved to the left (perfect for lefties), even further to the right (for those seriously hopeless right-handers out there), or placed directly in the center, to bash your brains in while trying to figure numbers out. An instant gain in productivity!
-Program the spacebar to backspace, move the cursor randomly, or just open IE to www.ebaumsworld.com. Great for office pranks!
-remap and customize the entire keyboard so that you become so hopelessly lost to the Age of Computers that you willingly give up our soul and mind to our Master Overlord CEO here in Easter Island, take our fun and entertaining New Pledge of Allegiance, and do our bidding forever as a corporate cog in our almighty machine. We will keep you updated.
Keyboard Dimensions: Measureless to Man.
Base Dimensions: Limited by your own power of imagination. But we'll soon fix that!
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The Ultra-Ergomatic Ergomagical Ergomystical Mega-Comfort Keyboard Solar System -$569, but soon to be mandatory for all new computer systems (ask your computer dealer for more information).
-duckwing, at 8:07 PM
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Wednesday, September 07, 2005
I Missed The Boat On Something, Goddammit!!
And if I'm going to get to bottom of it, I'd bet my left nut it has something to do with Justification for the War in Iraq, I dare say!
Christopher Hitchens, our official Katrina Aftermath correspondent, from the Ivory Tower.
-duckwing, at 10:44 PM
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Thursday, September 01, 2005
Seriously, Just Donate.
Here you go. Just take your pick. If you have cash to spare, my first hit would be the American Red Cross, but seriously, go nuts. Salvation Army, too. Whatever. Just go nuts.
Seriously, click on the picture on the top of my blog, and just donate some money
I have a couple of thoughts on this horrible situation, which are personal, but I really don't want you to read them unless you donate.
So I'm going to make it hard for you.
Did that work? No, I guess my pathetic attempt to blow you away with my clown picture didn't work either (I meant it to be about 200 times bigger that it appears on my blog). I don't know. I can't even really articulate how I feel about the situation in New Orleans this week. I just feel very sad.
UPDATE: HERE TOO
-duckwing, at 10:32 PM
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