Did you know that when people accuse Palestinians of being anti-Semites they're accusing them of hating themselves? Yes, Arabs, like Jews, are a Semitic people. You can look it up if you like. Or you can look at a picture of an Israeli and a Palestinian side by side and notice that they look like cousins. An Arab may very well be anti-Jewish, but an anti-Semite? No, that's the provence of other earnest haters. Sort of like that whole deal in Ireland where people who are pretty similar hate each other over religion. Religious hatred seems to be a plaenet-wide renewable resource, more than enough for everybody, thank you.

Who's idea was organized religion, anyway? Whoever it was, it clearly hasn't been working out all that well for a lot of people for a lot of centuries, what with all that irrational hatred, the "holy" wars, the torturing, the imprisonment, deportations, executions, diasporas, inquisitions, burnings at the stake and what have you. Then there's today's Special Eds, the Muslim suicide murderers who believe their very non-suicidal virgin-promising religious gangster bosses and our own Christian Fascists who would have you believe science is witchcraft and government should be run by them alone, to say nothing of the heinous shunning practiced blatantly by the Amish right here in America. All of which is very odd since all religions seem to preach peace and love. Go figure…

Did you know that Dr. Phil is really a doctor? Not a medical doctor or a psychiatrist, but a doctor of psychology. And I always thought his Doctor was a TV title, sort of like Captain Kangaroo. Well, at least he prepared properly for a TV Doctor career. He earned his doctorate in psychology with a thesis about a psychological approach to rheumatoid arthritis, I suppose figuring he could talk people out of their severe pain and gnarled joints. No word on how that all worked out when he went into private practice. He was sanctioned by the Texas Board of Examiners for Psychologists for unethical behavior so he got out of the private session therapy business and opened up Courtroom Sciences, Inc. (C.S.I., like the TV shows), a trial consulting firm advising both plaintiffs and the companies being sued on how to achieve amicable settlements. Nothing like the sleazy world of personal injury lawsuits to prepare one for a career in being America's TV conscience, eh? The bad news for Britney Spears? The case that got him sanctioned in Texas involved a young female patient. Oh well, there's one more big hurdle for that troubled young lady to leap…

Were you aware of a great groundswell of support for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run for President? Me neither. Haven't heard a peep. Or maybe it's just that I don't run in social circles where people have a burning desire to support the candidacy of a mega-rich guy with no discernible personality and no specific ideas of his own for running the country other than by corporate decree. Isn't that what Mitt Romney is for? How many of these guys do we need? I think if one of these CEO types ever gets elected they'll be awfully disappointed when they find out they're not allowed to outsource the American Government to India. "Hello, my name is Congressman Jimmy. How may I help you today?"

Did you know that more and more very elderly people are having more and more sex with the proliferation of all those Viagra-type drugs out there? Are you as creeped out by the mental images such information conjures up as I am? Just wondering…

Did it escape your notice that the globe is pretty warm for January? At least in New York it is. This past week has seen temperatures in the fifties and we have yet to get enough snow to make a decent snowball. Half the geese around here haven't even bothered to fly south! I blame Al Gore for all this. Don't shoot the messenger, you say? Why not? Who's to say it's not his fault? He wants credit for inventing the internet but won't take the blame for the film he made about Global Warming? Can we be 100% sure he didn't melt all that ice himself with a giant hairdryer in order to make his movie more dramatic? No, we can't. Besides, isn't blaming somebody a whole lot easier than solving complex global problems? Of that we can be certain, friends, that's another inconvenient truth. My snowball making skills are rusting away and Mr. Gore does nothing about it. Shame on you, Al!

Have you forgotten that all roses are not red and violets are actually purple and not blue? Makes me wonder which else of our memorized childhood rhymes were not completely accurate. What about that old lady who lived in the shoe who had so many children she didn't now what to do? Maybe she knew just fine what to do with them. Maybe they all went to college, then graduate school for their MBAs and bought Mom a high-rise luxury knee boot in appreciation. And what about Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water? Wouldn't it be more likely that the well was at the bottom of the hill, what with the laws of gravity and water finding it's own level and all, thus rendering it very unlikely that Jack would fall down and break his crown, to say nothing of Jill coming tumbling after? Why dig through a hill when you can dig the well at the bottom of the hill much easier? And so you question the nursery rhymes. One simply cannot fall up a hill, that's basic science. Nor can one tumble uphill, Jill. And don't get me started about Old Mother Hubbard keeping bones in her damned cupboard.

I would have never started questioning these things before medical authorities decided that milk is bad for you after countless generations of human beings were raised on drinking whole milk as one of the keys to good health. The other key? Red meat. Oh, great. My whole grounding as a human being is called into question, my every value up for grabs. Now I ask myself: Is it all that bad to play with my food? Is it really wrong to eat all the red and purple ones and share only the less tasty green and black ones? What's the harm in running with scissors? Is the worst thing about being hit by a car not wearing clean underwear? Or similarly, can I just run over jaywalkers with my car because they make me mad and let them worry about the state of their underwear? See the can of worms these doctors opened up? I'm even wondering now if it's okay to wear white after Labor Day.

Did you know that Wal-Mart is the largest employer in America? And that almost everybody working there hates their job? Wal-Mart won't allow unions in their American stores so the vast majority of their employees are underpaid and unprotected. They even tried to petition Congress to lower the minimum wage for their company alone, trying to implement something called a Training Wage, the length of the "training" to be determined by Wal-Mart and no one else. I suppose they figured $6.55 per hour with no benefits is way too much to pay grown men and women for selling their shoddy merchandise. In China, however, they have agreed to recognize unions.

As far as our huge trade deficit with China, Wal-Mart is responsible for 10% of it. They are China's biggest single customer, accounting for $15 billion dollars worth of Chinese-made goods coming here and the same amount of U.S. currency going there last year. Wal-Mart is owned and operated by some of the worst human beings to be found in any corporation anywhere, and that's saying something. They steal from the communities they invade and increase the social services budget dramatically wherever they go. The money you save at their cash registers you pay in increased taxes, not only for the welfare and food stamps for which their underpaid workers qualify, but much of which goes directly to Wal-Mart in the form of tax abatement. Tax abatement is a polite term for corporate welfare, the practice of government subsidies for billion dollar corporations that takes bread off workers' tables to provide caviar for rich people's tables. Anybody offer to abate your taxes lately? Welcome to the Wal-mart boycott, shoppers!

Were you aware that the potato was not introduced to Europe until the 1570's? They originated in South America and are now grown all over the world. Ireland lived and almost died on potatoes when they didn't import enough varieties of them and a disease killed their crops. The potato blight of 1845 to 1851 is why there are more Irish outside of Ireland than in it these days. Had they planted some more of the many hundreds of different types of potatoes, most of which would have been unaffected by Phytophthora infestans, the fungal disease that wiped out their main food staple, the Great Irish Famine doesn't happen, the Irish diaspora doesn't take place and history is quite different. That little oversight cost Ireland a quarter of its population between the starvation deaths and the Irish who beat it out of there quick to populate America.

Maybe the huge influx of Irish immigrants landing in New York who fought for the Union during the Civil War doesn't happen and slavery continues in America. Maybe John F. Kennedy's ancestors stay put and Civil Rights doesn't happen here either. Perhaps Fifth Avenue gets no parade on St. Patrick's Day and teenagers have no excuse for puking up their green beer in the streets on March 17th. Today, surprisingly enough, 80% of the world's potatoes are grown not in ireland or Idaho as may be assumed, but in Asia, feeding billions and grown in enough varieties to make a new Potato Famine extremely unlikely. All hail the mighty potato, the tuber that giveth and taketh away, humble shaper of history!

Were you further aware that when the Mister Potato Head toy was introduced in the dark ages when I was a boy that you used an actual potato? Inside the box were only the stick-on parts like the mouth, ears, eyes, a mustache, hands and legs and that hat you stuck on his head at a jaunty angle that gave Mister Potato Head his trademark panache. With the properly shaped potato you could even make him look like that other classy plant guy, Mister Peanut of Planter's Peanut fame. Mom supplied the potatoes and you supplied the imagination, which, by the way, had to be quite extensive to pretend to you were doing something other than mutilating a potato all afternoon. And later that night when Mom served mashed potatoes the old imagination had to kick into overdrive to eat your dinner.

Did you know that Alexander Hamilton was a native of Jamaica? I guess that explains the hairdo and the fact that he was good friends with George Washington, noted hemp farmer and Father of Our Country. Wonder if those two were Rastas? Irie, mon, I and I say time a come a revolution…

Speaking of Jamaica, hemp and Rastafarians, did you know that Bob Marley was not only one of the true giants of song writing, performing and social awareness, but he was half English too? Well, now you do. His father was an English military officer who abandoned him and his mother. Each one teach one…

Did you know why Albert Einstein had to die? He knew too much.

I can relate to most people. I'm from New York City, Brooklyn to be more precise, one of the most international places on the planet. Born here and stayed put since I love it so much. I coexist and interact with people from all over the world and get along with everybody pretty well. Not that I relate with everybody perfectly but that's okay, I'm sure there's plenty of people who don't get me either. Fine. I figure what's on my mind is my business and what's on yours is your business. In New York nobody really questions your right to be where you are and think what you think and be who you feel like being and I'm pretty comfortable with that.

And in life you make friends and of course work with people and have neighbors and get to know a lot of different people. By definition in New York City you get to know more different kinds of people than you would living elsewhere. Doesn't make us smarter or more empathetic than anybody else, that's just the way it is because of where we live. I like to think it gives us a unique experience as Americans, more of an idea of the many different nationalities that went into making America and what it really means to be American. In many parts of the country the population is more homogenized and Americanized than in places like New York. There is no sense of foreignness about people in the heartland. People are not as different from one another as they are here.

There's so many of us in New York born elsewhere or the children of immigrants and so not fully assimilated. Many New Yorkers would seem exotic and out of place in a lot of places in the United States. Even in towns relatively nearby in New Jersey or Connecticut it seems like all the people are pretty similar and of a like mindset, sort of like when you visit a town in France and of course everybody's French there, or an Italian village full of Italians. Well, New York isn't remotely like that. This is the cauldron in which the American soup is cooked and the ingredients haven't been melted together yet. You can still see tell the carrots from the meat and the potatoes from the onions and it takes quite some time for the soup to get pureed. So in New York you deal with people who are as different from yourself as a carrot is from a jalapeno pepper.

And what you find out is that most of them are pretty much like yourself. The same things make you laugh, the same things make you angry. Others love with the same passion as you love and get hurt by the same things that hurt you. Everybody loves their family and cherishes their children. Everybody gets annoyed at traffic or the subway or the thousand little things about living in New York that make it a challenge. Most of us here wouldn't dream of living elsewhere, even those who felt like a fish out of water when they first arrived. And we appreciate the incredible diversity of the people that share our city.

Which is not to say that it's all love and harmony here. We disagree on all sorts of things; politics, music, sports, styles of clothing, language, education standards, housing, jobs, taxes, cars, food, pretty much anything you can form an opinion about. New Yorkers are generally not shy about saying what they feel and it makes for some animated conversations outsiders might not understand. We may irritate and exasperate one another but as long as blows are not being exchanged or pistols fired odds are it's a friendly encounter. That's because people pretty much understand where the other person is coming from. At the end of the day you still might not agree with somebody but you understand them a little better and maybe go home with something to think about.

There are some people, though, whose mindsets are beyond me and I suspect I'll never understand their motivations and point of view. One group of such people are Orientals. I've never understood that whole face-saving bit and their deep shame over what most other people consider trivial matters. Now, Orientals by and large are pleasant, reasonable and intelligent people and a robust part of the New York melting pot; Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Indochinese citizens. For reasons I don't fully understand they mix with others less than other ethnic groups do and hold some notions most of the rest of us don't fathom at all.

Another group is Middle Easterners, Arabs and Israelis. They have some very strange notions, at least to me and many other people I know. Things like collective shame when one family member screws up, that stain-on-our-character idea taken to extremes. What, they never heard of a black sheep? Also their caveman attitudes towards women, apparently shared by a goodly portion of Middle East women. I just don't get it and never will. And then there's that whole vendetta thing. They make Sicilians look like Quakers when it comes to generations-long vendettas. Some of their grudges last through many centuries and none of them forget what it was about originally, they know exactly why and even the exact date the injury occurred. Some of the grudges are not even about a death but some insult or perceived lack of respect. Talk about insecure! I suppose when you look at how they operate in the Middle East you can see where this behavior has followed them to New York but the understanding of the great why is another matter altogether.

To me life just doesn't work that way, nor does it for the great majority of people I know. I suppose it doesn't matter one way or the other if I ever can fully relate to Orientals or Middle Easterners, I get along with them just fine and it's no skin off my nose. I know I'd sure hate to be a diplomat trying to get Middle Easterners to make peace with one another. And I'm not thinking of only that whole unfathomable Muslim-Jew deal in Israel but the many Muslim-Muslim hatreds and killings raging in many nations. And I've discovered through extensive contact with Israelis that Israel is not exactly a mutual admiration society of Jew loving Jew.

There's no shortage of Israeli Jews hating other Israeli Jews and I suspect that if they weren't forced to hang together to counter the constant threats from the Arab States these people would be industriously killing each other just like their fellow Semites in the Arab nations. Is there an American diplomat alive who can figure out the mindset of Middle Easterners? Not so far as I can tell but I could be wrong. It wouldn't be unprecedented but I doubt it because America has been notoriously lousy at Diplomacy since the beginning of the twentieth century. That's a whole other story but anyway I'll be damned if I can understand the Semitic mindset.

Another type of person I find inscrutable is many of my fellow white Americans, the real white bread types who really dominate this nation and define it way more than any New Yorker ever could. These are the people who find us exotic, even those New Yorkers who claim centuries of American heritage. Me, I'm second generation born of mixed European backgrounds but feel nothing but very American, but I wouldn't be considered all that American by some of the white people I refer to here. Again, like the Oriental and Semitic people I feel they're fine men and women of good character and intentions but I can't wrap my mind around where they're coming from.

I don't get that whole ambition towards staid respectability and stability that looks suspiciously like complacency to me. Their lack of anger at many of their number who have made a mess of governing our country and a mockery of America astounds me. Many of them have suffered just as much as our minority citizens under the current criminal regime in Washington. Perhaps the very blandness of the President and his henchmen has lulled them into thinking they can't be all that bad since they mirror the classic white American in looks and demeanor. Why they can't see the huge difference between thieving tyrants bent on hollowing the Bill of Rights while they methodically supervise a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy and honest hardworking Americans like themselves is beyond me.

A little New York style anger at those who abuse our trust is in order these days but it seems that the majority of the nation just can' muster that kind of unseemly behavior. There's some sort of fear out there of disturbing the status quo even while he status quo is stealing our country from us. We have an incompetent boob in the White House who started a preemptive war, something unheard of in this nation, and against an innocent nation on top of that! He has also succeeded in stripping the right of the imprisoned to a writ of habeus corpus, in other words, the right to appear before a judge in a timely fashion so that judge can determine whether or not the person has or has not been imprisoned lawfully.

That's one of the major reasons why America declared it's independence in 1776 and fought a bloody revolution; to stop the unlawful imprisonment of Americans by the king's government. Well, Bush the Younger is no king and has broken one of the most sacred covenants between civilized men, one of the rights that a government is required to provide its citizens before it has the right to call itself a civilized nation. Bush took that away and the cries and shouts from the rooftops were conspicuous by their complete absence. Then he started wiretapping ordinary citizens without a search warrant and intercepting their e-mails, violating the United States Constitution's prohibition against unlawful search and seizure. This is how societies are dismantled, piece by piece until you've got a police state where no one has civil rights. I don't understand people who don't resist tyranny.

Well, we almost had our Gulf of Tonkin incident the other day, nearly triggering hostilities with Iran. In the Straits of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf, three United States Naval ships had an "aggressive encounter" with five small gunboats of the Iranian Navy. Apparently the American naval Officers in charge of the three ships behaved with very disappointing maturity and wisdom, failing to blow anything up or even fire a single shot and extricating themselves skillfully from a tense situation with no injuries. Is that any way to provoke a war? Dick Cheney's so mad he invited them all on a hunting trip.

We've been hearing for months that Bush the Younger at the behest of his handlers is itching to start a third war, this one with Iran. Apparently we're not in deep enough shit to prevent people from noticing that this administration's record has been less than stellar so they've decided on giving us another war as a going away present, figuring they need something to cement their place in history as the Worst Show on Earth and also to keep citizens' minds elsewhere other than looking up the phone number of the Justice Department to insist they prosecute these clowns before they're done looting the treasury.

I wonder how the State Department is fixed for Farsi speakers for a war with Iran and if their sexual orientation is acceptable enough for interpreting duty. After all, the Iranian president recently assured the world there were no gay people in Iran. Which would pretty much explain the guy's pathetic wardrobe and the decidedly drab look of Tehran. Maybe the good folks at State should send those 5 guys from "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" over there in a kind of Lend/Lease arrangement to spruce up that drab country after we roll in and blow everything up. Sort of like a Marshall Plan with a lot more panache. At least it would some idea of what to do once you've defeated the enemy's army, unlike in Iraq where they had zero ideas the the second act.

Iran's next door neighbor Iraq, the country we've already blown up quite a bit, is long overdue for a makeover, so maybe the Queer Eye guys will do a two-fer while they're in the neighborhood. Perhaps we could combine the two countries into something called Iraqistan. Those wacky Middle Easterners don't seem to care what country they're living in, so why not make one up for them like the British used to do? Isn't that America's responsibility now as the reigning superpower?

Also from the desk of The Department of Pointing Out The Obvious: Most of the old school Presidential candidates of both major parties who dismissed Barack Obama's candidacy as hopeless and naive can't steal his message fast enough now that the American people have embraced his call for change in the way we do political business in Washington. Their speechwriters are working overtime at their paraphrasing skills so it looks like their particular washed-up corrupt political hack came up with the idea of changing all the washed-up corrupt political hackery that produced their candidate in the first place. It's not easy being a speechwriter for people who will pretend to believe anything they think the public wants them to believe on any given day, or who change their mantra hour to hour. Maybe they should go on strike and see what these numbskull candidates can come up with themselves to explain their swift appropriation of Obama's ideas.

Makes you think Obama ought to look into copyright infringement lawsuits. Or at least point out the obvious fact that his words are now coming from other people's mouths like he was a political ventriloquist with a dozen dummies. It's hard to take those other candidates seriously when they have to check with their handlers before uttering a single sentence, pretty much like a ventriloquist's dummy. If you watch a lot of these candidates closely you'll see that when they speak the words coming out don't match their mouth movements. And Obama's lips never move! That's talent.

As the Department of Pointing Out the Obvious has earlier reported, nobody but circus bears, insane asylum inmates and corrupt hack politicians require "handlers." Add ventriloquists' dummies to the "needs a handler" list. Well, maybe Obama should fool them all and prepare a press release announcing that from now on he will appear in public dressed only in a bright red speedo and a Homer Simpson tee-shirt. Can't wait for the next televised debates when he's the only guy in a suit.

Now that Hillary Clinton narrowly won the New Hampshire primary she's sure to double up in reciting Obama's call for change like it was her idea. This shows America she can compete with the big boys when it comes to abandoning all her original campaign ideas and latching on to someone else's message, at least for the moment. Well, political pundits call her pragmatic and realistic, catch words for caving in and betraying your core beliefs to gain high office. Other than her gender, what's so new and different about that? Don't we have enough of those kinds of people running for the presidency?

And what's her plan for Iraq? Caution, of course, pragmatic and realistic caution, political speak for not having a clue and continuing an insane war year after year until she gets one. Just like Bush the Younger, actually. Brilliant. This way she provides continuity when nobody wants Bush the Younger's policies to continue. And Ms. Clinton's universal health care plan that makes the tax code look simple? Heard much about that lately? She's had since the beginning of her husband's administration in 1992 to figure out if she's for health care as a basic human right in America or not. She once was but now she's realistic and pragmatic about it.

When she and Bill Clinton tried to implement socialized medicine when he was a brand new president they were slapped down by a hostile Congress in no time at all and you didn't hear a peep about it again during Bill Clinton's two terms. Apparently she was unaware of how many Senators and Representatives have long been bought and paid for by the medical insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies. Well, now she's been a Senator herself for seven years and presumably knows who is in whose pocket. What's going to be different this time? Yet another pressing reason to change every member of Congress in 2008.

And in all this Barack-Hillary hoopla people are forgetting the guy with probably the most substance and the best ideas, one John Edwards. He's had trouble raising the huge dough one needs these days to run for president. Presumably there's only room for two media darlings in the American media, making it easier for people who report on politics for a living to do what they do. Apparently they're not all that talented or maybe they're just plain lazy when they ignore a candidate of substance who throws a monkey wrench into their pre-planned story lines.

One would think that this time of year with all the primaries coming up would be a field day for our political media, a chance to explore and discuss the whole wide spectrum of candidates and the ideas that fuel their campaigns before some begin dropping out. Apparently that's not the case and they find that it's more convenient to narrow the field of discussion to just a couple of candidates in each party. Anybody notice a lot of attention paid to Republican candidate Ron Paul except as some sort of fringe joke? He just happens to be the one sane Republican candidate and the only one with thoughtful policies and thus I suppose rendered less interesting than Romney the shameless chameleon or McCain the grumpy old fart.

Besides, the media already have their side plot in Rudy Giuliani, perhaps the most unhinged egomaniac of all the Republicans. So Ron Paul and John Edwards get no points at all for behaving like reasonable adults with sound ideas because that sort of responsible behavior isn't such good copy. The media seems to love the megalomaniacs and charlatans most of all. Well, that would be all well and good if they were novelists creating compelling rascals as characters for their books but political reporters are not novelists and covering presidential campaigns doesn't have to be an exercise in celebrating bloated personalities who want power only for power's sake. Who hasn't read a dozen Sweeping Saga books like this in our lifetimes? Or seen the movie, for that matter, with Burl Ives or somebody like him playing some variation of Big Daddy.

If newspaper and television reporters want to be part of the process of selecting candidates they should join a campaign and stop pretending to be reporters. When a reporter is assigned to cover a fire he doesn't get to pick the fire that's the most out-of-control fire of the year. He has to simply report what happened and who was involved even if it wasn't all that fascinating. Why does journalism change when it comes to political reporting? People don't run for president or vote for a president in order to keep reporters stocked with sensational stories. Alright, it worked out quite well for the nation's comedians electing Bush the Younger but enough is enough. How many daft old Ronald Reagans and dumbass Dubya's must we endure in order to keep comedy writers gainfully employed?

Most voters want to find out simply who's out there and what they're offering and don't give a rat's ass what the media people think of their chances, or of their spouses, their hair-dos, their clothing, their children or their religion for that matter. Contrary to popular wisdom, the average voter is well able to decide what he or she thinks is important, what with most of them being responsible adults and all who have gotten this far in life without the guidance of bored political reporters creating stories where there are none and ignoring stories where there are some. So maybe it would be a good idea for political reporters to report on events instead of trying to create them. Just a suggestion from the desk of The Department of Pointing Out The Obvious.

Guess what, boys and girls? It's already the 11th of January and that means were almost in the middle of White History Month! America is celebrating the history of white people in America with television specials, magazine articles and newspaper profiles of famous white people. Believe or not, there were a lot of white people who have contributed a whole lot to building this nation. For example, did you know that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was white? Most of his descendants were not, but he sure was.

When whites arrived in this country they were a tiny minority, mostly refugees from evil European kings seeking to make a new start in what they called The New World. The red people who were living here didn't call it that, they just called it The World since it was the place they had lived for thousands and thousands of years and they didn't know any better. White people liked it here very, very much and and sent word back to Europe that there was a whole lot of great farming land and plentiful game and timber and fish, much more than the red people needed since there weren't all that many of them. So more and more white people came here and convinced the red men to share it with them. The red people were very happy to have such smart teachers!

Before too long there were so many white people here that the red people moved west so the white people could use the land properly. It was a lot of hard work to build a civilization from scratch so the white people brought some black people here to help them. They decided there were too many forests in America so with their new black helpers they chopped them down and created big beautiful farms. They sold the wood to Europe where most of their trees were chopped down already.

These farms were so big they needed a better name for them than just farm so they called them Plantations. Plantations were very cheerful places that produced a lot of cotton and corn and other good things. You could tell how happy the black people were because they sang songs while they worked in the fields. They liked their work so much they worked from sunrise to sunset every single day! And they had white people to thank for this opportunity, kids!

The black people were thankful enough to build the white people very big houses because they knew whites like to have a very big house. The black people, having come from Africa, were not used to living in big houses so they made tiny cabins for themselves apart from the white people. They also realized that white people did not like to work in the fields all day long so they did all the planting on the plantations. And the plowing and the harvesting and woodchopping and cooking and blacksmithing and wagon building and housework too. The red men would not do these things for them so the whites needed the black people's help.

After a while the red people started to resent that the white people were more successful than they were. They were jealous that the white people turned the New World into a lot of pretty towns and farms. When the red people had farms they only grew enough food for themselves instead of selling most of it to Europe so they didn't need big farms and black helpers. When they hunted animals they didn't kill more than they could eat. They were not smart enough to kill all the animals in the forest so they could sell their skins to people across the ocean and let the rotting meat of the skinned animals fertilize the ground so it would good for farming when they chopped the trees down and sold the lumber. It was a win-win situation for the whites and for the soil!

Finally the resentment led to bad arguments and the red people had to move to places that were just big enough for them instead of hogging the whole landscape. These places were called reservations and the red people found happiness there. No longer did they have to hunt or roam the wild wilderness but instead they could finally settle down and drink whiskey the white people gave them and live in tiny cabins like the black people. The white people then decided that nobody needed a billion buffalo so they killed most of them to make room for farms, once again selling the skins of the buffalo and letting the not-so-tasty bison meat fertilize the Great Plains for farming. Then they planted millions of acres of wheat and soybeans and corn and alfalfa and rye and vegetables.

Then the white people met the brown people who were in the southwest. They were called Mexicans and were ruled by evil Catholic white people from Spain and France. They also had way too much land, more than they could use so the white people bought a lot of land from the French Catholic people. This was called the Louisiana Purchase. The land included much, much more than only Louisiana. It actually doubled the size of America! Some of the red people living on the purchased land did not remember the French people owning it but the whites showed them the receipt from France and it was all legal and proper so those red people went to reservations too to relax.

In the Southwest the brown people were very mad at the evil Spanish Catholic kings and told them to leave them alone. The evil Spanish Catholics were not so happy when the brown people threw them out and made their own country called Mexico. The white people were very happy though, because they realized the brown Mexicans didn't really need Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and California. They already had all of Mexico all the way down to South America! The white people knew that this was more than enough for them. The brown people did not know how to make use of all that land so the whites moved in and showed them how it's done.

The brown people also were not aware of Manifest Destiny, the term used to describe how white people showed the red people and brown people how to create a proper civilization. Well, soon enough they learned all>/i> about Manifest Destiny and gave the white people the land they didn't know what to do with. In the Pacific Northwest there were also places loaded with timber and deer and beautiful rivers filled with salmon that the red men there were just wasting so whites moved to the Oregon Territories and made some pretty towns and farms there too. These lands were not part of the Louisiana Purchase and the white people decided that must be a mistake and the red men must want to get to know them. The red men were astonished at the resourcefulness of the whites and soon moved to their own cozy reservations so the whites could make the Pacific Northwest civilized too.

White people then decided after some big arguments between them that they called The Civil War that black people didn't have to work on the plantations anymore. They figured they'd be happier doing chores for white people and living in tiny cabins all over the big new country called America. So the black people got their own special neighborhoods to live in, their own nice schools and even a special place to ride on the buses and trains! The country had gotten so big that white people needed a lot of railroads in it so they brought over some yellow people to help the black men do the chores. The yellow people came from China and they helped build the railroads and wash and iron white people's nice clothes.

They were very happy in America and moved into a lot of neighborhoods in America's cities they called Chinatown where they could live together in tiny apartments. White people were amused at their funny language and very happy to let them live in America and do chores for everybody and make Chinese food for whites and blacks and browns to enjoy. The red people were on their reservations so they didn't eat Chinese food. They were very happy to eat government beef that nobody else wanted and grow vegetables in the sand and rocks where they lived if they were lucky enough to get rain that year.

Meanwhile more and more white people kept coming to America from different countries in Europe where the evil kings were making them very unhappy. Most were very poor and a lot of them were Catholics so they had to live in tiny apartments together and do chores too until they learned to be civilized. When they were civilized then some new immigrants came to America and did chores for them and lived in the tiny apartments that were owned by more civilized white people. The new white people who kept arriving seemed to be pretty hungry all the time so more farms had to be carved out of the unused land to feed everybody. Soon America was almost filled up with white people and their black, yellow and brown helpers so it was very lucky that the brown people had given the white people the land they didn't need.

Other countries liked America and bought a lot of of food and nice things we made in our factories, making some of the the white people very, very rich. Russia liked us so much they sold us Alaska for about a nickel and acre. The Hawaiians liked us so very much that they told their queen to stop being queen and let white people build giant hotels on Wakiki and let them dock their big navy boats in Pearl Harbor and grow a lot of pineapples for people to eat. People like pineapples. The brown Hawaaians liked having the smart white teachers rather than some silly queen!

Then some other yellow people from a place called Japan got jealous and sunk some of the white people's big navy boats. That was not very nice so the white people locked up the yellow Japanese people living in America on their own reservations and took away their land and property. Then they went to war with Japan and punished them by incinerating two of their cities with very, very big bombs. The yellow people were very sorry then for sinking the white people's big navy boats. The people from Japan are now good friends with white people and make cars for them.

While all this was going on there was a very very big war in Europe between different kinds of white people. The German white people attacked a lot of other white people so a few nations ganged up on them and destroyed their country and set free the Jewish white people that the German whites had been killing for no reason for years. Everybody pretended it wasn't happening since they were not Christians but only Jewish white people. Believe it or not, kids, there is a difference between Jewish white people and civilized white people. Nobody is exactly sure what it is but they accept it, boys and girls, so we won't ask a lot of silly questions about that, will we?

So now the big wars were over and American white people were very powerful. They had come a long way from being the tiny minority who came here in little boats. Now they pointed those very, very big bombs at Russia because Russia did not like America anymore and pointed their own very, very big bombs at this country! All these very, very big bombs were very, very scary to the red and brown and yellow people all over the world. This went on for forty years in what white people called The Cold War. Isn't that a funny name, boys and girls? Russia finally broke apart into a lot of little Russias and America was left as the most powerful nation on earth. The white people in America still have all those very very big bombs but there's no one to point them at anymore, a very, very sad thing for the white generals so they keep them handy just in case anybody feels naughty enough to try to sink their big navy boats again.

In these days in America everybody is equal; the whites, the browns, the yellows, the reds and the blacks. Almost everything here is owned by a very small group of white people who are the most equal of all but they called dibs and everybody is happy for them. The rest of the white people do the chores for them along with the brown, black, red and yellow people. Sometimes people complain but as you know, children, nobody likes a crybaby!

Everything is very nice and pretty and happy in America and sometimes the rest of the world gets jealous and says mean things about the white people in America but nobody cares because those people live in tiny cabins with hardly any food and did not learn how to civilize themselves. If only they would learn from the whites they would probably be much happier. That is why sometimes the white president sends the Marines to visit these unhappy people. After the Marines are finished you don't hear too much from them so they must make the unhappy people happy again. These people are then much too busy building new houses and roads and factories to worry about being sissies and whiners.

So let's celebrate White History Month, children! Thank a white person today for the wonderful place that is America. And if it is more wonderful for white people than for brown or black or yellow or red people, well, maybe white people are just better at having fun, boys and girls. Don't some children know how to have fun better than other children? Can you say Manifest Destiny, Billy? Can you spell Eminent Domain, Loretta?

Want to earn a six figure income from the comfort of your recliner while imbibing no end of beer or wine and nibbling tasty pretzels and chips? Welcome to the club, fellow future titans of e-commerce! If we are to believe our e-mails and promotional ads that pop up everywhere on the internet, we're all just a mouse click away from sitting around in our underwear all day collecting BIG dough. How many pictures of some young dork named Travis or Parker for a first name do we have to see sipping an umbrella-drink on his luxurious deck overlooking the ocean before we get in on the gravy train of e-commerce? According to these guys it takes no more effort than making micro-wave popcorn. I'm down!

So what are we waiting for? An idea, maybe? Dang, I knew there'd be a drawback! What to sell on the internet that isn't being sold already? By nine hundred different sites, too. And cheaper than you could imagine. Well, this internet thing is still in it's infancy so all the good ideas can't have been used already, so let's brainstorm a bit here and see if we can up with some sure-fire big earning websites. The bigger the better. After all, who just wants to earn a mere living? Bah, pish and tosh and to heck with all that! You want to be rich as Travis and Parker and sit around all day between trips to the mailbox to empty it of its heavy burden of checks.

Hopefully you can hire a courier to bring this hefty daily package to your bank. Perhaps your pool boy can do this chore once he gets finished cleaning your Olympic-sized swimming pool and sleeping with your ex-model trophy wife. Or your personal maid Amber once she's done polishing your solid gold grand piano and sleeping with you. What sort of idea could sustain that sort of lavish lifestyle? There must be something out there in Dot Com land waiting for us to fully exploit its potential. I'll give you my idea but don't steal it.

sendmeabuck.com
That's my web address for telling people to send me one dollar. For their dollar I'll share my secret to internet success. The secret will consist of an e-mail informing them that my secret is having a whole lot of people send me a dollar via Paypal.com. They simply forward the dollar and I make 90-something cents after Paypal takes its cut. No one will bother to sue for a lousy dollar and the e-mails to them are free so I figure I'm right around the corner from the intersection of Prosperity Avenue and Easy Street. But not to be smug, I have a few other suggestions for you hard-charging armchair entrepreneurs.

paymetogoaway.com
This can be a website that bombards people with annoying e-mails, but not of the Bulk/Spam variety, but regular e-mails that clog up their Inbox with irritating messages. You offer to stop it for a one-time payment of $39.99 or four easy installments of $10.99. When you are paid in full you simply stop e-mailing that person. And the more obnoxious the e-mail the greater chances of collecting your $39.99. Most of you will have no problem at all mastering the annoying e-mail, you're there already and don't even know you're sitting on a pot of gold as well as your fat duff all day getting on your friends' nerves. Branch out! Piss off thousands and thousands of people and try not to get smothered by the avalanche of cash heading your way!

allowme.com
On this website you offer to provide nasty insults to people that your customers are too polite or timid to attack themselves. Have some e-mailing fun while making hefty fees! You can have a sliding fee scale ranging from anonymous flips of the bird to one's boss to relationship breakup e-mails to just telling somebody your client hates where to get off in some very odious terms. Here's a good slot for those creative writers out there wasting their time doing tedious research and writing boring articles in the vain hope some publisher will buy your boring novel. Face it Jack, you're not the next Hemingway and the only way you're going to see Steven King money is to sharpen your virtual claws and spread some real venom by creating the nastiest website out there. Again, this idea is tailor made for many writers whose only talent lies in tearing others to shreds. Go get 'em, Mr. Grinch!

thankyouverymuch.com
Another site for writers who can provide lazy people thank you notes for gifts or favors received. They can be form letters to say, Grandma for that neat scarf and sweat socks she sent you for Christmas, to people who invited you for a weekend at their country house or for that generous donor of that lifesaving kidney you recently received. Your thank yous can be in the form of an e-mail or for an extra few bucks an actual letter they can download and print out and mail as if they had bothered to do it themselves! Note: Get busy right now since Christmas just passed and the thank you notes are flying! And lazy people being what they are, the Christmas thank you season extends well into Springtime. Good luck!

youareanidiot.com
Young computer-savvy entrepreneurs, take notice! A lot of older people have all sorts of trouble using their computers properly. You see, they grew up in a time when the most complicated appliance in the house was the toaster and so they are fairly helpless doing most things on a computer. Write a manual explaining the obvious to tech-challenged computer users. Promise them the answers on how to use their computers with the ease of a pre-teen. The beauty of this idea is that the manuals need not be true! When they buy your expensive booklet or downloadable tutorial and still can't make heads or tales out F-12 or Command Z they will blame themselves and never seek a refund. Not only that, a goodly portion of them will ask to buy more information from you to explain what they couldn't understand in the first place. Customers for life! Better than selling drugs!

losersRus.com
This is almost too easy for those addicted to searching the web. Make your obsession pay! You simply scan all the dating service websites and match up people from one site to those in another, always picking the obvious hard sells on each site. For a fee you introduce them electronically, collecting from both parties for the privilege of meeting an even bigger loser then they are! Of course they will both be equally repellent people but you sell them to each other as someone who's going to make their sorry asses look good! And the great thing about this idea is that by definition the people who seek companionship on a website are almost all incredible losers. You'll be tripping over eyesores and dullards eager to meet somebody dumb enough to date them! Lazy eye? No Prob, Bob, Suzies got a hare-lip! A wooden leg, Peg? Piece of cake, Jimmy's got a comb-over and purple birthmark shaped like Finland on his fat forehead! Acne scars, shmacne scars, Georgie
boy I've got a lovely lady for you nicknamed Buffalina who's just a tad overweight, by about 300 pounds! You're gonna look like George Clooney next to her, buddy. Tourette's syndrome, Millie? You'll look like Emily Post compared to Spike, who never bathes and lives to be cursed at and spat upon. A match made in heaven! These matches may not result in marriages, but look at the self-esteem you'll be promoting in these people while you get rich off their misery. How rewarding is that?

Well, there's a few platinum ideas in just a little bit of time with the old grey cells brainstorming up some big piles of currency. I hope those who take my advice cut me in for a commission or at least a finder's fee. I can even see some billion dollar IPO's in the very near future. So, fellow internet moguls, let me know what ideas you have for getting really rich really quick. So far as I can tell, the World Wide Web's still wide open. Get busy and I'll meet you by the pool this time next year! Maybe I'll introduce you to my incredibly attractive personal maid Amber.

P.S. Attention faithful readers of bobcrespo.com! Send me one dollar, yes you read that right, just one American dollar and I will tell you the secret to get rich quick. Simply click on the CONTACT page of this web sire and with your credit card and Paypal account send me a dollar via e-mail. It's just that easy! Once the transaction has been cleared I will e-mail you the simple secret of my success. Act now and get nothing extra! (What do you want for a buck, you greedy bastard!)

I ordered one of those For Dummies books to help me record music on my computer easier. While perusing the topics on the official Dummies.Com website I couldn't help but notice that some of the subject matter covered by the For Dummies books looks kind of complicated. "Business Consulting For Dummies" struck me as rather odd. Why would anyone hire an outside consultant for his business who learned his trade from one of these big yellow books with cartoons in them? Maybe if the business owner in question learned his skills by reading "Business Intelligence For Dummies." Just don't look for that business on the Fortune 500 list anytime soon.

In my own case I happen to know quite a bit about recording music but not all that much about the ins and outs of computers. Fortunately for me my son Rob is a computer whiz, even has a degree in Computer Graphics. He's pretty patient with me when he teaches me something new on the computer and I commend him for not rolling his eyes when explaining the obvious to his tech-challenged old man. I suppose he's matured from the days when he had to program my VCR for me. I caught no end of grief over that technical shortcoming. Thanks, pal.

My other son, Mike, is also a musician and like me not such a whiz with computers. No doubt I'll be sharing my Garage Band For Dummies book with him. Unfortunately for Mike and myself (but very fortunate for him) Rob has a life and a pretty wife and a living to earn and the whole nine so he can't really be at our beck and call whenever one of us runs into a computer glitch. He's very generous with his time for his family but I try not to cry wolf too much and solve the minor things on my own. Hence, my Dummies Book.

It also strikes me that I've been working on a computer for years and years now and it bothers me that I haven't made myself the master of these machines. A long learning curve like his would have been fatal to myself and any number of others if computers were, say, cars. Rob assures me that even though he makes his living on computers that he's always learning something new, sort of like a doctor who has to learn about all those pesky diseases and new treatment techniques that have sprung up since he graduated from Medical School. That makes me feel somewhat better and less of a Dummy, but hey, I'm the one who's a musician and had to order the For Dummies book to help me record my music, not him.

I am after all a man, and computers are machines, dammit, and a man needs to know he's in charge of the damned machines, period. I wouldn't take this crap from my car or my power tools, who know who's the boss. I don't let any of the household appliances push me around either. They know I'll just take them apart and fix them or at least mess with their innards and then call a repairman in to finish the job. The computer on the other hand knows it's holding all the picture cards and I won't go near it with my wrenches, screwdrivers and hammers. It knows I'm just going to call Rob, who will then instruct me to push a series of keys in precise order before the computer will grant me my wish. The computer still rolls its eyes at me all the time.

The whole man/machine dynamic is changing here and makes me feel less like a man, and more of a hu-man I suppose, and maybe that's a good thing. I suspect all the other machines in my life breathe a little easier now knowing I'm not the undisputed lord and master of every machine I own and operate anymore. They're also not as subject as they used be to a random overhaul by me, especially since more and more of them are computer-based or at least have a chip or two in there somewhere. Ball peen hammers and open-end wrenches have little or no effect on such things outside of wrecking them completely. Without going into embarrassing particulars, take it from me, I know.

Anyway, there I am online perusing the many For Dummies titles in amazement. There's even a medical section and one title that blew my mind is "Multiple Sclerosis For Dummies." Here's hoping that those afflicted with that terrible disease aren't seeing a doctor who caught up on their disease with this book, or worse, are trying to treat themselves. And here's hoping they don't publish a "Heating Your Home With A Nuclear Reactor For Dummies" anytime soon. Or "Eye Surgery For Dummies." One suspects that our leader Bush the Younger learned everything he knows from "Presidenting For Dummies." So far, so good, no?

Maybe he didn't go far enough in the Dummies.com Catalogue. There's also "The Bill of Rights For Dummies," "Speaking in Public For Dummies," "3rd Grade English Grammar For Dummies" and "Follow-Up Plan to Military Victory For Dummies." Reliable reports tell us that Bush the Younger instead concentrated on "Brush Clearing For Dummies" and "Giving Dopey Nicknames For Dummies." Hell of a job, Brownie! Maybe the good people at For Dummies Publishing can knock one off called "Admitting I Blew It Big Time For Dummies" for when Bush the Younger is finished Presidenting.

Or they can help our troubled young celebrities with "Blonde Bimboing For Dummies" or "Drunken Driving For Celebrity Dummies." They already have some For Dummies books explaining the use of cell phones and blackberries so maybe instructing famous people to install the phone number of a cab company in their speed dial function when they have consumed a bathtub full of champagne to bring them down from the half-ounce of cocaine they just ingested might be an informative and helpful learning tool. Failing that, there's always "Public Rehab For Dummies," "Defense Lawyering For Dummies" and "Talk Show Confessional For Dummies" when they need to repair what is left of their reputations.

And what about the rest of us, the non-presidential, distinctly not famous people who live in this great (and apparently very easily explained) land of ours? How about "Locating Your Universal Remote Control For Dummies?" And who wouldn't benefit from "Mental Therapy on TV For Dummies," a definitive analysis and comparison of Oprah, Dr. Phil and their many life-coach TV pal colleagues. Follow that one up with a weekly guide mailed to our homes called "What You're Supposed To Believe This Week For Dummies" to help us figure out what what we ought to be all up in ams about after watching Bill O'Rightly.

Sometimes that stuff changes pretty quick and you don't want to be caught off guard believing some simple truth that is old hat, like the importance of human decency and understanding in international affairs or the concept of letting your neighbors live their lives and raise their children according to each their own conscience. Everybody knows that stuff is so yesterday but we find ourselves confused as to what to latch onto this week as a set of grounding principles.

Much to our chagrin these basic values are not as timeless as we'd been led to believe. This is a modern world, we're told, and beliefs and truths must adapt an change as swiftly as the technology so we need to get with the program, or abandon the program and latch on to another immediately, whatever the case may be. Sign me up. I'm older now and get confused sometimes with swift change. It's always nicer when someone explains things. This way we Dummies all know what's expected of us.

And who knew they'd be publishing a book called "Doing Business in India For Dummies" that was apparently a best-seller in corporate boardroom circles? who knew there'd be a chapter about shipping the whole kit and kaboodle over there and firing your fellow countrymen who had made you such a bang-up success in the first place? Live and learn, eh?

So that leaves an opening for "Surviving on Minimum Wage For Dummies" or "Decoding Tech Support Calls to Some Guy in India Insisting His Name is William When He Can't Even Pronounce William For Dummies." I think these For Dummies people are not so dumb after all. They've got their finger on the pulse of Dummy Nation and to prove it they cancelled publication of "Evolution For Dummies" and will instead release "Intelligent Design For Dummies" and let others worry about the odd title, figuring that Dummies consider irony the act of taking wrinkles out of clothes.

At any rate, this Dummy just received word from the internet company where I purchased the book that indeed they shipped it, figuring a Dummy likes me needs a slow and careful explanation of how Fed-Ex operates. This gives me an uneasy feeling I'm heading down a road with no U-turns allowed, like just like visiting a website called DUMMIES.COM makes me wish they called their books something else. Books for Lay People just isn't that catchy, I suppose, nor is Topics Easily Explained Books. I just hope for an extra couple of bucks I can get a plain brown wrapper so people will think I'm a fan of hardcore pornography rather than a Dummy.

Woke up this morning in a cold sweat, jolted awake from a pretty vivid nightmare. Like all dreams both good and bad it had that feeling of oddball reality, like when you dream that everyone in the world has a third eye or that part of a police uniform is heavy mascara or that infants speak Latin or some other singular oddity that in dreamland is taken as a given. It's only when you wake up do you recognize the absurdity of the assumed reality upon which your dream is based. Well, I had one one of those doozies last night.

Like many nightmares, there were no monsters or goblins, no bloodshed and extreme violence, just that helpless feeling that you're the only one in the world who recognizes that one of the big assumptions everybody has is completely off the wall. It wasn't one of those obvious ones where you're on the subway in your underwear trying to look cool about the whole thing while desperately trying to get home before everybody notices you forgot to get dressed that morning even though you know that they know and they know that you know they know but everyone's acting all nonchalant about it. Or the classic one where you're falling endlessly into some abyss and wake up just before you hit whatever it is at the bottom of dreamland abysses.

No, this one was one of those sneaky nightmares where you're going about your business as usual but you find that everybody else has some really weird things on their minds that you can't understand, like in your whole life you just didn't get it, what ever "it" is. Then you realize that people are convinced of something completely impossible or incredibly surreal and you can't convince anyone of the patent ridiculousness of the situation. You're the one who's the delusional oddball and you become immersed in the maddening feeling of a world turned on its head and that's what makes this seemingly innocuous dream a nightmare.

Well in my dream the weird reality was that I woke up in a different country but it was really my country. I thought maybe it was Canada at first since everyone was speaking English and looked and acted American but I soon realized that it was really America because nobody was saying eh? at the end of every sentence or pronouncing the word "about" as aboot. But in this dreamland America we had a borderline mentally retarded guy as the President and everybody was trying to pretend not to notice, just like when in real life mentally challenged people act outrageously and you do the right thing an not make a big deal of it because what the hell, they're special people who don't know any better and they've got a serious affliction. But in real life they're never the president.

In my dream the whole nation seemed to go out of their way to ignore the fact that they had elected a mentally impaired man as their president, not wanting to seem insensitive or cruel to the handicapped. A fine and proper sentiment I thought at first in my dream but soon realized that we're not talking about a retarded person dressing himself wrong or spilling food or saying something inappropriate but running the country. When I pointed out the obvious I was told what an insensitive lout I was to say bad things about the disabled. Of course I felt horrible about it because it did sound pretty mean to say such things about the President but then he started doing some really irrational things like starting a war against a country with whom we had no argument, locking up people who had done no wrong and suspending the rights and liberties of everybody else.

So I spoke up again and the people in my dream told me to shut up and stop making fun of the disabled and besides, didn't that country deserve to be destroyed because they were so foreign and different? And if you're so worried about people getting locked up then maybe I was hiding something that might get me locked up too. And I was further told that the rights and liberties the president was taking away were no big deal to good citizens who didn't make fun of retarded people. Now I really felt like an insensitive lout so I shut up again. Some people assured me he really "wasn't that retarded," just a little bit below sub-normal. Others asserted that he only acted that way to lull our enemies into thinking he was stupid. "Crazy like a fox," they said.

So I tried to go with the program and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. after all this was America where they tell you anyone could grow up to be president. Maybe I had a prejudice I needed to deal with. Maybe I wasn't being as open-minded as I thought I was. Then I got to thinking about it and realized that maybe the president should be somebody who could spell more that "cat" and be able to tie his own shoes or be allowed near the stove. When I shared these thoughts people told me I should be ashamed of myself for picking on the mentally challenged again and I felt deeply ashamed, all my assumptions about my own character called into question and rightly so. Again I held my peace and tried to face the demons within me that made me such an insensitive lout and a bigot.

Then I saw the retarded president attempting to make a speech again and it was as usual an embarrassing travesty for all concerned. His eyes wandered around the room like he forgot where he was again, he stumbled on simple words and forgot everybody's name, didn't know what city he was in and even forgot what he was talking about several times before losing interest altogether and just sort of wandering offstage aimlessly. It was painful to watch and now I'm thinking we're not doing this guy such a big favor letting him be president, maybe even being kind of cruel.

Couldn't we just have told him he's the president if we're so worried about traumatizing a retarded man? He'd never know. For all we know he doesn't even know now the he's really the president and he's just pretending and that's why he does such outrageous things. Mentally impaired people have a sense of humor too, you know, a pretty good one sometimes. I told everybody that maybe we should think this through a little bit, maybe this joke has gone far enough and we're just embarrassing the poor guy at this point.

Boy, that just got me in even more trouble with everybody. And just to prove me wrong they elected the retarded guy to a second term! Now normally this is the point where you wake up screaming and then sigh in relief that it was just a nightmare but I kept right on dreaming. In my dream the guy gets elected again and starts compounding his previous mistakes by ruining the economy and talking even more gibberish than before. And you know how dreams are, people act like nothing's wrong in even the most absurd situations and this was no different. You had people talking about the retarded guy's place in history (!) and how his presidential library would be so unique because it would contain coloring books and how very presidential he looked for a handicapped person. Saying things to him like "You're such a big, smart boy!" and "Good for for you, Georgie!" I was told I should be proud to live in a nation where the American dream can come true for even the mentally challenged.

Now I'd reached the point where I realized I was having a nightmare but just couldn't wake up. The numbing frustration of that feeling continued as I tossed and turned and the retarded guy kept doing nutty thing things and then smiling that goofy, clueless smile like he was pleased with himself. The worse his behavior became, the broader was his goofy his grin and the more earnest his defenders became, telling me we should be proud to have a president so unselfconscious and spontaneous and unafraid to act the fool. I said that's nuts, this is the presidency we're taking about! I was told what's the big deal, it's not like it was something important like a reality show or a video game or what J-Lo is up to lately, it's just the presidency, let the retarded guy have some fun!

And I started to believe it! People convinced me that the guy was really harmless and his eight years would be up soon enough and then we could elect someone else president to fix the funny messes he made all over the place. They told me we'd get a responsible adult to be the next president so stop worrying and let the guy have his way. Then the presidential campaign started and I saw that eight or nine of the most important candidates were retarded people too, blabbering about keeping the nation safe by locking up everybody who doesn't agree with them, that Jesus designed dung beetles and promising to keep fighting the retarded guy's war forever and ever. That's when I woke up with a jolt.

Wow, that was some dream! I'm still trying to get oriented again, moving around my house this morning, making coffee and doing the routine things you need to do after such a vivid experience. Boy, dreams can be pretty weird and powerful sometimes, no? I'll just take a shower and go about my day and try to forget about a very disturbing night's sleep. But I have this nagging feeling still about me, some nebulous uneasiness I can't really put my finger on. But something tells me that maybe I shouldn't read the newspapers today. Or tomorrow either.

So Barrack Obama won the Iowa caucuses, a pretty shocking thing to a lot of people since Iowa has but a 2% black population and Obama is a black man. Is America growing up? Hope so. Not that the Iowa caucuses mean much. Only about 10% of the population usually participates and it’s not really a primary with straight up voting for one candidate or the other. There’s 1,784 voting precincts in Iowa and in each one a meeting is held for a couple of hours to elect 99 county delegates to the state conventions. Those 99 delegates representing Iowa’s 99 counties then select delegates to Congressional District Conventions and State Conventions and the State Convention eventually picks the presidential candidate for each political party. Or something like that, it’s pretty unique. Confusing, too.

There are no voting machines, and campaigning goes on for a while in these meeting rooms from representatives of the different candidates who try to convince their neighbors to vote for their man or woman. The Republicans do their candidate selling and then hand out blank slips of paper on which the attendees write a candidate’s name. The Democrats dispense with secret ballots and after their campaign speeches move people around the room to designated areas called “Preference Groups” until one candidate winds up with the most people in his little group and is called a “viable candidate.”

You with me so far? I know I’m getting lost myself here trying to figure it out. The Democratic Party method sounds like a cross between Charades and Musical Chairs, two parlor games presumably popular in Iowa where some of the caucuses are actually held in people’s parlors. It’s probably a nice way to elect a dogcatcher or local sheriff but a pretty bizarre forum for national politics, and a fairly elitist one too with that 10% turnout. The thing is held for a couple of hours in the evening as opposed to actual primaries and elections where polling places are opened from early morning until around nine at night, ensuring that people with just about any sort of schedule can vote. And then there’s lots of people who don’t want to spend two hours of their lives casting what is essentially a non-binding vote when they could be voting for some young wannabe on American Idol.

But this year something different is going on in America if Iowa is any indication, even if it’s only the first of a long run of primaries leading up to the actual National Convention of each party. This year in Iowa 34.4% of the electorate turned out, much more than usual for such a strange affair as their caucuses. People are paying attention and more importantly, at least on the Democratic side of politics, they are picking a new voice, turning their backs on the perennial contenders and their same-old, same-old Grand Visions and cockamamie schemes. In spite of the political machines’ best efforts to alienate us all from the Madison Avenue sales campaigns that picking our presidents has become, people are paying attention.

I suppose we have George W. Bush to thank for that. He’s a prime example of the kind of president you get when we’re not paying attention and vote for slogans and ad campaigns. Well, that particular brand of corn flakes sure didn’t live up to it’s hype so now people are finally realizing that it’s kind of important to have a smart guy as president. Bush is shaping up as one of our worst presidents and that’s saying something with some of the inept clowns who have sat in the big chair in the Oval Office. There’s been no shortage of those and I suppose Bush figures he’s got no shot at all at adequacy, never mind greatness, so he figures he’s definitely got the stuff to go for the record of Worst President Ever. Hey, having his TV show voted the worst ever made Jerry Springer a household name, so what the hell, why not go for it and really make a mockery of the office and leave America in a shambles? I guess that’s one way to go down in history.

If Barack Obama goes the distance in the long and unpredictable presidential campaign he’ll make history before he’s even sworn in, what with him being the first black man to become president of this nation that used to enslave black people. But that’s not why I support his candidacy. I like the guy because he represents change and America needs to get back on track in our never-ending quest to become America. Barack Obama wants to change the way of doing political business in the United States. I say we help him do it by voting out every single Congressman and whichever Senators are up for reelection in 2008. Those tired, spineless and greedy hacks are just as much to blame for our political inertia as Bush the Younger and his cynical elitist puppet masters.

That would really shake things up in Washington, no doubt about it. The Congress has enjoyed a 90-something percent rate of reelecting incumbents. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination are nine out of ten of these people doing a good job. The results of this rubber-stamping of their tenures has been entrenched power for small minded fools who regard elections as an annoying interruption to their treasury-looting, Bill of Rights-shredding, war-profiteering, bribe-taking and vote-swapping ways. Sure there’s some good ones in there but not good enough to have made a difference in the way our government operates.

The good ones haven’t raised any sort of stink about the whole corrupt enterprise. Their voices were simply not compelling enough, the examples they set apparently impressing nobody. The earnest business of running the government for the benefit of corporate interests and entrenched governmental powercrats goes on unabated and we’re stuck with ruinous wars of aggression, the erosion of the quality of life for average citizens, attacks on our very freedom we can no longer take for granted in the Land of the Free and an us versus them political mentality that benefits no one but the entrenched establishment.

But that can change with a single election. Turn the whole government out on its ears and install a new one, no revolution necessary, using only the system already in place. Simply vote for whoever is opposing any incumbent Congressperson in the primaries to deny them even the chance to run in the general election. That bold act will put the entire government on notice that America is sick of their representative government no longer representing their interests. Naturally some members of the new Congress will be lousy but they’ll have a harder time being louses with a vigilant and angry electorate on their case. Barack Obama wants change? Let’s take him at his word and give him some real change, a Congress that is not bought and paid for by corporate lobbies or political machines.

But where will be the experienced hands in government, you say? Well, they’ll be experiencing the shock of being on the outside looking in for one thing, wondering how their sweet racket slipped out of their grasping lunch hooks. All their so-called expertise and experience is what got us into this mess in the first place and hasn’t done a damned thing for their constituency. Let them to sit back and watch others run the governing for a change, people who are on notice that the voters are taking names and kicking ass. And let Obama be one of those people on notice, let him not take his power for granted for a single day.

The thing is, the American people have to stay interested in America and what it’s supposed to mean to them, how it’s supposed to operate and how it deals with the rest of the world. It’s one thing to be an annoying son of a bitch telling everybody you’re number one, quite another to quietly go about the business of being number one. Walking the walk is always a lot harder than talking the talk. Mindless repetition of slogans impresses no one but fools. Unfortunately, our current crop of entrenched politicians have built their careers counting on the American people’s foolishness and to our embarrassment it has worked splendidly. We’ve latched onto those slogans like a kid to an ice cream pop and now we find that the ice cream doesn’t taste so sweet when you lick off the outer coating and we’re all sucking on a crapsicle.

It’s time we spit that crap out and fire the salesmen who foisted it off on us. Let them apply for unemployment insurance when they find out the lobbyists already have plenty of shady insiders on their payrolls. And if we keep breathing down the necks of our elected representatives just maybe the lobbyists won’t find all that many takers for their bribes. We can also vote against our rapacious corporations by shopping elsewhere. Nobody should be able to force the American people to buy their shoddy goods, businessmen or politicians. Let’s elect Barack Obama president and give him and ourselves the gift of a brand new Congress to try and turn this car around and get back on the road to becoming America again.

I live in Brooklyn, originally called Breukelen when it was settled by the Dutch in 1634. They called their little slice of the New World New Netherland and had big plans for the place. Well, a lot of people make big plans only to see them unceremoniously derailed and that's what happened to the Dutch Walloons. After only about 30 years here the British took control of New Netherland and renamed it New York in one of the early wars over control of the many colonies European nations were carving out of other people's homelands all over the world in those days. The Americas were not the only chunks of real estate to gain the benefits of conquest, domination and exploitation by the minions of rich guys in powdered wigs and pantaloons.

Clown suits and fright wigs aside, these conquerors weren't all that amusing to the indigenous people on the receiving end of their blunderbusses, broadswords and cannon. The Spanish were especially ruthless and barbaric as they dismantled and completely obliterated sophisticated cultures all over South America to the point of burning all copies of their written languages, stealing their gold, razing their fine architecture and enslaving entire populations, that is when they weren't earnestly burning people at the stake in the name of the Prince of Peace. It was quite confusing to the locals. Sort of traumatic, too.

The Brits, Dutch, Portuguese and the French were no better, although they weren't as honest about their intentions as the Spaniards. They sort of wrapped their bloodthirstiness and greed in noble claims of civilizing the "savages" for their own good, if you allow that working them like draught animals and stealing their national treasure and resources is a viable path to personal growth. Well, the natives did learn about Europeans, I'll give them that, learned quite a bit indeed. The hard way, naturally. They didn't have the benefit we moderns have of the many text books that inform us of the tricky ups and downs of benevolent paternalism.

These backward unfortunates had no concept of the bended knee or the kissing of the bishop's ring. They turned out to be quick studies, though, and in no time at all half the world's population was happily toiling on behalf of foreign kings and their assorted noble minuet dancers. Most of the colonized took it in stride but, truth be told, a lot of resentments did build up over the years, what with the conquered people not really understanding the big picture and the whole notion of conversion by the sword. Working sunup to sundown with a sadistic whip-happy overseer as a cheerleader hardly gave them much time for sober reflection on the greater good.

It's hard to have a detached perspective on the whole affair when you're tied to pole while some toothless lout is lashing you bloody while his buddies have their way with your wife and daughters because you didn't produce enough tobacco for the King this year. There wasn't a lot of thoughtful reflection happening at that point, nor was it the sort of occurrence you'd all get together and laugh about in later years as some sort of unfortunate but amusing misunderstanding. Especially when it kept happening century after century. That sort of behavior eventually wears thin on people and the result always seems to be bloody revolution which for some unfathomable reason always came as shock to the guys in the powdered wigs and pantaloons. Those revolutions really put a damper on a lot of fancy balls in many a palace in the "Mother Countries." They just couldn't understand the blatant ingratitude of the locals.

Be that as it may, back to Brooklyn and the Dutch, who even though they ruled the roost for only 30 years around here, seemed to have retained as a condition of their surrender the right to name everything. Places like Midwood, originally the Dutch Mitwout, meaning middle woods, their first farming community, was purchased from the Mohawk tribe, the purchasing part being a novel concept for conquerors. (No wonder the British ousted them, actually paying for the land! That was an unconscionable breach of conqueror etiquette.) The place was flat as a pancake, ideal for farming, hence the name for the larger community that sprang up around it called Flatlands.

The main road was and still is called Flatbush and there's still all sorts of Dutch-named places around; streets, avenues, parks and neighborhoods called Hendrickson, New Lotts, Van Dyke, Van Wycke, Amersfort, Gravesend, Remsen, Newkirk and Paerdegat (The original occupants, the Native Americans, only got to name Canarsie and Rockaway.). There's still several Dutch Reform Churches still going strong, most notably the big one on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and the aptly named Church Avenue built in the 1600's. It has one of America's oldest cemeteries behind it, representing possibly the only Dutchmen still actually residing in Brooklyn. I can't be sure but I believe most of them moved to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to make egg noodles and cheese.

Even if there are few if any actual Dutch people in Brooklyn nowadays, their Dutch Reformed churches are still in operation. There's also a few of their farm houses still around, carefully preserved and now minor tourist attractions and landmarks. And the place is still as flat as they found it, no doubt about it. There hasn't really been enough time for the earth to upheave and create a mountain chain around here, more's the pity for Jeep owners. The highest hill in Brooklyn is the mountain of garbage alongside the Belt Parkway on Fountain Avenue.

God knows what fountain that street was named for but it's long since buried under a minor mountain of refuse. The garbage dump is no longer in use, thus depriving enterprising mobsters of a convenient place to dispose of the bullet-riddled corpses a gangster accumulates as he works his way to the top of the heap, excuse the pun please. The City of New York is now in the process of paving those piles of trash and rotting gangster victims, covering it with soil and planting grass and trees on the place to make a huge new park. Hopefully, this new set of green rolling hills will come complete with a bunch of roads so that my neighbors can finally make full use of their giant 4-wheel drive trucks.

For some reason about a third of the people on my block own one of these all-terrain cowboy cars designed for Marlboro Country. Unfortunately in Brooklyn the only terrain to be had is a whole bunch of flat streets affording one exactly no opportunities to see what this baby can do when it comes to the all-terrain part of your $30,000 vehicle. What it can do in Brooklyn mostly is wait impatiently at red lights with a bunch of other hill-climbing cars longing for a slight incline somewhere, anywhere so the drivers can kick in the 4-wheeliness of their ride and go cowboy, but that just never happens here. How sad. How very sad.

And I see the owners of these cars gaze wistfully at the construction project on Fountain Avenue when they are stuck in traffic jams on the Belt Parkway, their metal stallions champing at the bit beneath them, begging for a challenge, a chance to run free, to climb, for God's sake! You can almost hear these magnificent machines imploring their owners to let them be the creatures they were born to be, to crunch over boulders and streams, to climb rocky terrain and traverse the raw wilderness, to justify their ridiculously low gas mileage at the very least!

So here's what I'm proposing: Make this new park a 4-wheel drive vehicle playground for grown ups! Alright, it's not the Rockies or the Adirondack Mountains or anything like that, but as far as Brooklyn goes it's Mount Everest and the best our SUV drivers can expect in Flatlands, emphasis on the Flat. Cut some rough, winding roads through the former garbage dump, as steep as the little hills can accommodate and charge ten bucks a pop to let our neighbors finally get to put their vehicles to the test. Sedans and mini-vans need not alpply. Line forms to the left. The revenue can be used to create some swift-flowing streams for the vehicles to drive through, just like in the television commercials. What fun!

All-terrain vehicle owners in Brooklyn will rejoice! Cowboy car fanatics from Queens too, since their borough is unfortunately bereft of a mountain of garbage to convert into a scenic automobile playground. Maybe in Staten Island they will be inspired to do the same with their own giant hill in the Arthur Kill (another Dutch name) land fill. That worthy pile of trash just happens to be the largest man-made hill on the Eastern Seaboard and the largest hill of any sort in New York City, a heady distinction of which Staten Islanders are justifiably proud. The challenge of conquering Mount Staten Island with your Caddy Escalade would be the pinnacle of urban cowboy driving.

The government is also in the process of turning Arthur Kill into a park, even though it produces such a huge volume of methane gas they sell it to the local utility who then sells it to us to heat our homes and cook our food, the leftovers of which are rotting away and producing all that methane. There's a lot of those pesky environmentalist who call themselves "Greens" who don't agree that this sort of recycling is a win-win situation. They are also up in arms over what they say are extremely high concentrations of carcinogens and a host other lethal toxins polluting the soil and ground water near the former dump. Maybe they have a point and it might not be such a good idea to let our children roam unsupervised in such a park for say, I don't know, maybe 2 million years or so? No sense letting our little loved ones turn green too. Those people are just killjoys and pests.

But what's the harm in letting them ride in the back of a giant SUV while Daddy or Mommy get their kicks? Special hazardous materials masks could be provided for the whole family, from baby Loretta to teenaged Bud on up to Grandpa, maybe even having them equipped with alarm buzzers to alert drivers to leave areas with extra-high concentrations of poisons. Shouldn't be a problem for these motorized behemoths to roar out of the danger zones with minimal cerebral damage to little Billy. That little element of risk just adds to the challenge and excitement of the ride. These two former dumps could become tourist attractions, sort of like Disney World without the annoying mascots. But in these theme-parks, the theme will be motorized madcap fun and the rides will be your own, subject only to the laws of gravity!

So what are we waiting for, New York? If we're going to continue to drive bigger and bigger SUV's able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, why not give them a place where they can strut their stuff? Why let Montana and Wyoming hog all the all-terrain glory? New Yorkers are people too, and as Americans have the same cowboy dreams as the rest of our countrymen. Whether or not its that's a realistic outlook on life, it is reality. SUV sales statistics don't lie. So let's build our own personal Ponderosa Ranch and rev up those big old V-8's to our heart's content.

Beep beep! step aside, puny economy sedan, make way for a hard-charging, rough-riding, fire-breathing, Arab-pleasing Big Boy!

There’s a guy out there in America screaming at the top of his lungs about human rights. He also has declared himself the avowed enemy of the Bush Administration and their vile and illegal war of aggression in Iraq, all the while entertaining American troops at USO shows (7 war zone tours) and frequently visiting grievously wounded soldiers in Veteran’s Hospitals. He never declared himself the enemy of American soldiers or citizens. As a matter of fact, as American citizens, he’s one of the best friends we’ve got. His name is Henry Rollins.

He started his public life as the lead singing front man of several punk/alternative rock & roll bands, most notably Black Flag and the Rollins Band. He’s actually a gifted singer/songwriter and can deliver a song in several different styles. He performs music with an intense passion and a manic, angry stage presence that well serves his chosen musical genres. His bands were critical successes but never really blockbuster breakthrough stars, probably like a lot of seminal acts in the tradition of the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges, earning more respect from their peers than money and influencing countless younger musicians.

Somewhere along the line, even before the breakup of Black Flag, Henry began recording spoken word records and touring to support them. They were an eclectic lot, excerpts from tour diaries, observations on America and comedy, all of them compellingly honest, thoughtful, intelligent and original. An important American voice was born. I’m not sure when his political activism began, or if he is even aware of when it began or if it has been something that was always a part of who Henry Rollins is. Whatever the case, his is a welcome voice and a strident reminder of what America is supposed to be.

I was especially impressed by a show he did in Tel Aviv, Israel that was shown on the Independent Film Cable TV station (IFC on your dial). He said some things about wounded soldiers and American foreign policy that were both very funny, if you can believe comedy can be wrenched out of such grim topics (I do now), and also very poignant. He also had the balls to inform a paying Israeli audience that it was their responsibility to stop the endless cycle of hatred and violence in their country that had been handed down to them by their parents’ generation. He asked them if it was a proper legacy to their own children to hand this cycle of death down to them or do they end it here and now.

They listened somewhat uneasily as he expertly threaded his way through a powerful monologue with this message as his finale and Henry wound up receiving a thunderous standing ovation. Powerful and courageous messages aside, I could not help but admire his courage as a performer to take such a risk with his closing number! As a fellow performer I know very well that you close with your biggest crowd pleaser, then take a bow and leave them wanting more. I thought this crucial message also resonated very strongly in regards to the American electorate and the upcoming momentous decisions we face in 2008. As well as being deeply impressed with his message I said to myself: “This guy’s got balls!”

He also has brains too, and a unique talent that’s hard to describe. Is he a latter day Will Rogers? Well, if Will Rogers had a bunch of scary tattoos and a muscular, menacing physique and used the words fuck and motherfucker frequently onstage and was strident and angry a lot of the time instead of mellow and laid back, then yes, he’s a lot like him. Like Will Rogers, Henry Rollins gives people a lot more than a laugh or an entertaining story. He always gives them something to take home with them and think about. There’s a lot of meat in the funky stew that both these gentlemen have managed to cook up for our mental dining pleasure. And again like Rogers, Henry Rollins is a quintessentially American voice making very American observations about the things he sees around him in a country he loves very much.

Henry Rollins is also very aware of maintaining his personal integrity, something rarer than it should be in a performer and rarer still in political activists and social commentators. He campaigns for the rights of people that he has no vested interest in and are not necessarily a part of his fan base, like the gay community and American soldiers (whose Commander-in-Chief he frequently lambastes). He does it because it is very obvious to him the right thing to do and for no other consideration.

By his own admission he is a driven workaholic that lives a fairly Spartan existence and is probably the only celebrity living in Los Angeles who does not own a car. He tours frequently, maintains several busy websites, hosts a music radio show and host the Henry Rollins show on IFC. It is the Henry Rollins TV show that made me a fan of the man and his eclectic talent and broad intellectual interests so I reverse-engineered my knowledge of the man and looked up a lot of his work. He is not anything what you’d expect him to be like and I love that. He follows no popular political agenda like a Pavlovian Pooch mouthing the words of others. He doesn’t do what he does to please people otherwise he’d be a rich man and a household name. Compromising his principles for money or popular approval doesn’t seem to be his long suit.

When a subject interests the man he researches it diligently and draws his own conclusions. His half hour show includes an opening monologue, an interview with a very interesting person about which Henry has taken the trouble to learn much about, concluding with a musical performance by a guest band or solo musician and perhaps a short closing video piece by him. There are no commercial breaks and it’s one of the few talk shows you wish were longer.

So check out the important American voice that is Henry Rollins. He has a lot of important things to say and a very engaging an original way to say them. If he is not exactly what you expected, well, like Santa Claus once told me: “That just goes to show where you can stick most expectations.” You may love him or you may hate him but you will not be somewhere in the middle about Henry Rollins. And when you hear him speak you will have something to think about that you didn’t have on your mind when you woke up that morning. I can think of no higher complement. Keep your eye on Henry Rollins. I have a feeling he’s just getting warmed up an really honing his voice and his best is in front of him. That may be asking a lot of a man who has given us so much but I think he’s more demanding of himself than any fan could ever be. Keep up the good work, Mr. Rollins.