From Salon, a review of the first "Vote For Change" show in Philly, with the Springsteen, REM line-up.

"Hunched over a 12-string acoustic guitar, standing in the lone spotlight of an otherwise darkened Wachovia Center in Philadelphia Friday night, Bruce Springsteen began his tour sprint to help unseat President Bush with a bluesy, instrumental version of the “Star Spangled Banner.” “America is not always right -- that’s a fairy tale you tell your children,” Springsteen later commented from the stage. “But America is always true. And it’s in seeking this truth that we find a deeper patriotism. Remember, the country we carry in our hearts is waiting.” "

Read the entire review (well worth sitting through a commercial if this is premium content)
From RJ, a couple of quotes worth remembering:

"Naturally, the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." : Hermann Goering

"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men": Plato

And, finally, via my cousin, E.L. Doctorow's essay on President Bush. All the more worth reading since the debate, where the President allowed as how he knows how tough war is because he sees it on TV. Putz.

"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel inm the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his "mission-accomplished" a disaster.

He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did.

He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to. Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator.

He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you.

Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills -- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind.

It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E.L. Doctorow

In a world where celebrity is measured in single names, I think that Richard Avedon was the first photographer to be elevated to the status of the faces he photographed. Avedon, like his subjects, only needed one name.

I'd be lying if I said that in art school I didn't worship the richness of his images. Where the boys were drooling over Ansel Adams' zone system, I was mesmerized by the clarity and depth of Avedon's portraits.

I was never so much of a fool as to think that I'd ever make anything as beautiful, but I shot an awful lot of black and white of my friend Patti.

Richard Avedon, another of my heroes, has left the planet.

The animals, the RLA and I have a game we play. It's called "Sockie on the Head" and it consists of (when putting socks on or off) taking the sockie and bopping the animal on the head with it. Ming tries to hook it with his claws, and does a mighty fine job of catching them, I may add. Nails bites the sock. Or at least snaps at it. We love this game.
I bring this up because when I got back from the gym last night, the RLA was watching the "debate" and one look at the smirking, simpering chimp and I went wild. I ripped off my gym socks and proceded to beat the talking head on the TV screen. I played Sockie on the Head with Dubya.

Sigh. Dubya. He fumbled, he mumbled and he stumbled his way through 90 of the most excrutiating minutes on TV. It was awful. I couldn't sit through the whole thing and went off to the showers. When I came back he was still there repeating his one memorized line: Kerry changes his mind.

I don't know about you, but if I had never changed my mind about anything, I'd still be a redhead married to the Anti-Christ. I'd still be drinking coffee milkshakes accompanied by Bar-B-Que potato chips and I'd still think that shoulderpads were a good look. Granted, most of those are superficial beliefs, and not the earth-shaking ideals that Dubya was yapping about, but if he hadn't changed his mind about certain things, he wouldn't have gone AWOL in the National Guard and he'd still be drinking like a fish and snorting cocaine. So maybe changing your mind isn't the sin he likes to make it out to be.

Of course, born-again Christian though he is, he still lies like a rug. High crimes and misdemeanors.

I kept waiting for Kerry to answer one of Bush's snivelling platitudes about the value of every American soldier's life with the question "Oh, yeah? Then why haven't you had the grace to go to a single one of their funerals? Why don't you let the American people see the price we're paying by showing photos of the flag-draped coffins of the military dead? And don't tell me it's out of respect, because you are using the dead of 9-11 like fucking wall paper, every chance you get."

But that wasn't going to happen.

I thought whoever dressed Kerry did a great job. Loved the black suit and white shirt: it really played off that great hair of his. It was stark, it was dramatic, it was a dangerous fashion choice and it rocked.

Verbatim from today's blog:

What Kerry Should Say (Rude Version):

If, at tonight's "debate", when Kerry is asked, "What would you have done differently in Iraq?", he doesn't answer, "What the fuck kind of question is that, Jim? Jesus Christ, how many corpses of children need to be piled at the door of the White House to know that any reasonably well-trained terrier could do a better job managing this war than that motherfucker at the other podium? How many dead soldiers need to clog the pool at the 'ranch' in Crawford before anyone in this goddamned administration admits that things are more fucked-up than a thalidomide baby with warts? Here's what I would have fuckin' done different: Short answer - I wouldn't have fuckin' gone to Iraq, and if this squinty fuckface wants to accuse me of leaving Saddam Hussein in power, then he can fuckin' ask the mom of some kid blasted to shit by a roadside bomb if she gives a rat's ass whether or not Saddam's in power and Iraq is gonna have fake elections to prop up its fake ass government. Long answer? Yer askin' me a fantasy question, Jim, and if you wanna get into fantasy, here's my fuckin' fantasy - so get your wish-fulfillment bell ringin': I'd've gotten a large gay black man to get into William Rehnquist's shower back in late November 2000 and had him scare the Chief Justice into a coma with his raging black hard-on. I'd've fuckin' sent the SEC probin' Bush's asshole for evidence that he fucked over the shareholders of Harken. I'd've sent his fuckin' drunken, coked-out, duty-skippin' ass to Vietnam, where the men of his platoon would've used him for practice before raping the village girls in the Mekong. I'd've yanked down his pants at a Skull and Bones meeting and paddled his butt bright red with the wooden plank that had 'Bitch' carved in it so the word would be scarred on his ass forever. I'd've spiked pregnant Barbara Bush's drink with an abortifacient so she would eject the goo that would become George W in her womb. I'd've gotten George, Sr.'s nuts ripped off when he ejected from his fighter jet. I'd've made sure Prescott's dick was mustard gassed into disuse in the Meuse-Argonne. That's what I would have done differently in Iraq. Now, you little semi-conscious cuntface, get Karl Rove to shove a talking point up your ass about that or do you want me to make you suck my cock in front of a national audience?", then the debate will be worthless.

This is the week that a good deal of my stress ends: the project from hell is due to go live on Friday.

A little recap: sometime in the middle of last year, the hospital got a new web management tool. My father died the first week of May. While I was sitting at his bedside, web tool was installed and configured. It had taken almost 9 months to get the tool installed. The day I returned to work, I started on the site conversion. My PHB asked me how long it would take, and I told him six to nine months to complete the work, if the PR department cooperated with content, and assuming I'd be working on this pretty much alone. He said that he'd help (yeah, right) and that I had three months.
So I have been working como un perro ever since. The PHB "helped" for a month or two by adding and deleting links and going to California for classes and then by leaving me alone to do my work. The PR department "helped" by telling me how to structure the site, demanding pages be added, then not giving me content, and lastly demanding that those empty pages be deleted.

Thursday we have a demo and are supposed to go live on Friday. That's two months longer than my boss gave me, and one month less than my shortest estimate.

I've also been maintaining the existing live site, keeping it updated and adding pages. I've also been going to meetings and doing all the other day to day business I'm expected to manage.

And then there's my personal life: executing my father's estate, trying to keep an eye on my mother's care (she has advanced Alzheimer's) and worrying about the various extended family that lives up and down the Treasure Coast. The names of the cities that they live in would have been unfamiliar to 90% of America until this month, when they were in the path of two monster hurricanes.

Vero Beach, Port St. Lucie, Stuart, Hutchinson Island, Snug Harbor, West Palm Beach.

I have no idea today if my cousin's house in Vero is standing, or my auntie's condo on Hutchinson Island exists. I haven't spoken to my brother in Port St. Lucie (his mother-in-law died in the last storm and I have little hope that his father-in-law will do any better in this one). I spoke to Mummy's nurse yesterday morning, but haven't heard since.

Yesterday, I had a full-fledged anxiety attack in the middle of the afternoon.

Today, I am back at my desk, pounding out another 20 pages or so in anticipation of Thursday's presentation. My flu is in remission. My boss is over at his west coast house, stuck in the Tampa airport.

My horoscope keeps promising me good fortune in business. I have two resumes out, and am waiting to hear from other opportunity. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Item the first: I've got the flu. That'll teach me to discount the RLA's misery when he gets it first. I'm falling over in my chair, surrounded by OTC flu products and big honking box of tissues, spreading my disease to my co-workers because (despite my personal feelings about coming to work when sick) I have the web roll-out from hell in one week, and I have to be here to work. Hah! and Good Luck with what ever I produce today.

Item the second: Bruce Springsteen is 55 today. Happy birthday, Bruce. Read his most excellent interview in Rolling Stone. Here.

Item the third: Hurricane Ivan is back? And Jeanne just won't go away. She's bearing down on the Florida coast for the third time, after wandering in circles in the Atlantic for two weeks. Just beat us up, and go away, already.

Item the fourth: I'm preparing a rebuttal to the person who dropped a comment on my entry down below about the Bush family, and how she admires their family values. So far, I have found multiple arrests spanning multiple generations for crimes ranging from breaking and entering, to DUI, to drug abuse. I have located the reports of Neil's philandering and Poppy's. From personal friends, I have the story of Barbara's anti-Semitism that goes back to her childhood. And that's just the opening paragraph. I haven't even gotten to the high crimes and misdemeanors of the sitting president. However, with the roll-out from hell, and the flu from next door to hell, that rebuttal will have to wait.

Go read what Bruce has to say. It's worth the read.

Don't perform in front of one. It's pretty simple really.

To the stupid bitch sitting across from me on the train this morning, whispering into her cell phone, behind her hand: Hey! If you don't want other people to hear you, then don't use the phone on a crowded train.

But then, she also put on her make up in the train. So what can I expect?
To paraphrase Rodney King: "Can't we all just shut the fuck up?"

What ever happened to internal silence and thought? Huh? How come we all have to have a fucking soundtrack to everything and every moment of our lives? I admit that with my addiction to my i-pod, I'm guilty of this, too. Except, I turn the damn thing off now and then. But all I see are people with head sets: telephones, talking to the invisible other; music delivery systems, rocking to something only they hear. In their cars, walking on sidewalks, on treadmills at the gym, on the trains, buses: everywhere. People are separating themselves from the rest of humanity at the expense of our humanity.

Instead of saying that we need to stop and smell the roses, I think we need to turn off the noise and savor the silence.

I came in this morning, and my boss walked into my office and closed the door. Never a good sign. Especially bad sign when the Herald ran a front page story yesterday about the layoffs.

Our VP saw "the list" and was "very surprised" by the names on it. Remember this is the VP who swore on his mother's honor that not one person would be cut from our department. The names themselves have not been revealed, merely that they were a surprise.

My boss then extended this advice, which came from the upper middle manager above him, but below the VP.

"We in this group should mind our Ps and Qs and do whatever we are asked by whomever asks. This is not the time to make waves, or enemies. The PR department is in full charge of the web. Do what they say and no back talk. Of course, this means that you can still point out to them mistakes in spelling or whatever. But..."

I've been watching Shogun for the past few nights. And all I can think of is the various daimyos telling Blackthorne that he'd better behave or else ... "Do you understand?"

Hai. I understand. I'm fucked in the ear with no oil. Or as the PR department is so fond of saying "It doesn't have to be done right, it only has to be done."

Ok, I seem to be over my funk and now I'm just pissy and bitter and annoyed with the world. You may ask how this is different from before, and I will tell you: before I was miserable, now I'm going to make other people miserable.

To begin:
Item 1

Just so all you people* on the weather channel know, "normalcy" is not a word. The phrase you are so desperately searching for is "normality".

"There is a sense of normality on the west coast of Florida as the hurricane shutters come off." Or "Now that the power is back across Port St. Lucie, you get a feeling of normality in this backwater shit hole."

Item 2

Picking a president should not be based on the concept of who looks like they might be fun to drink with. One of the commenters in my entry "The Devil Came Down to Florida" explained on her own web site that the reason she would support Dubya was because she thought John Kerry looked like Herman Munster and would probably bore her to death if they went out drinking, but that Dubya looked like he'd be fun.

Are you fucking kidding me with that shit? First of all, the POTUS is a tea-totaler and has been since he found Jesus. Secondly, unless you are a Jesus freak yourself, I can damn near guarantee that you won't be having any fun at all with one.

Secondly, if it comes down to that, I think that I would be more likely to be bored stiff by Dubya than Kerry, if only for the reason that I enjoy spirited debate and intellectual stimulation and I am pretty sure that the spoiled, intellectually deficit person known as Dubya would cause me to break down in frustrated tears after the first ten minutes.

Thirdly, shouldn't the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the free world be someone with an IQ higher than a fence post? Shouldn't your decision to elect someone to put their finger on the button be based on who has the wisdom not to push it in an attempt to bring on the second coming and the apocolypse and not necessarily in that order?

Item 3

What is with the bras that look like they are lined with Kevlar? If you are going to wear a padded bra, wear one, but at least pretend that they might be real. Those nippleless, stiff nose cones sticking out under the tight tee don't look even remotely like human female breasts and are even a little scarey.

I'm just saying.

* Are those people reallymeteorologists, or is that just a new term for TV weatherman?

Isn't it amazing how fast jokes can propagate?

I just recieved that from my cousin up the coast.

I'm a touch busy, so I'll just give you the name of my new favorite author. You can look him up yourselves, write the book reviews for me, what ever you like. But he is just brilliant, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Jasper Fforde.

And there's your proof. The devil and his brother handing out ice and water in hell.

I believe that there are signs from higher powers all around us, if we only look. For example, an ex-friend of mine insisted on getting married. She didn't care to whom, but she was particularly challenged by one man who very much did not want to marry her. She eventually wore him down, and they wed. They also divorced, not more than two years later, after having never lived together as man and wife, and after both had had affairs with lab assistants at their respective research labs.

We all told her that this was a bad idea, and even (if you believe in such an entity) God weighed in on the subject by:
1. On the arrival of her parents from Taiwan, they were robbed of all their money and the heirloom wedding jewelry. Between the cab and the front door of the hotel, a distance of not more than 10 feet, and of course nothing was ever recovered, and no one was ever charged with the crime.

2. The next day, someone at the bridal shower was contagious with one of the worst, most virulent flus anyone had ever seen. And the seafood salad may have been bad. The upshot was that most of the wedding party was puking and running 104 degree fevers right up until the wedding took place.

Coincidence or sign from above? You decide.

To bring this back to the photo at the top of this entry, consider this:

1. Both Jeb and Dubya insist that they serve by the preference of God. They both point constantly to the higher power that guides their decisions. Even Pat Robertson has decreed that Dubya is God's chosen leader for America.

2. Jeb had this to say about Hurricane Charley : "God doesn't follow the linear projections of computer models," the governor said outside the Punta Gorda emergency management center, whose roof caved in during the hurricane. "This is God's way of telling us that he's almighty and we're mortal."

3. Following that storm, Frances slogged across the state in the opposite direction, making a perfect "X" across the peninsula. Sort of crossing it out?

4. Now, Hurricane Ivan, stronger than the two that preceded it, is preparing to rip the state a new asshole.

Hubris? God's way of saying "Nuh-uh, don't be pinning your shit on me, Bushboys."? I think so. Yes, I do. I just wish that I wasn't in the way of that point being made.

Maybe it's the funeral. Maybe it's the threat of Hurricane Ivan. Maybe it's my general indigo funk, malaise and bad attitude, but I put together a little playlist I call "Easy for me to listen to".

Sample tracks include Tom Waits' "Waltzing Matilda" (live), Bob Dylan & Paul Simon (live) "Sounds of Silence" and the Ramones "Sheena is a Punk Rocker."

In fact, the majority of the songs in this list are live tracks from the Bob, or Tom or any number of other male artists with terrible voices that I love so true.

But, in the ever wobbly balance of my life, I just ordered tickets to see the Indigo Girls in late October at a fabulous little jewel box of a Deco-era theater in downtown Miami.

The final reports from my family up the coast are in. One cousin lost a section of his roof, another lost merely soffits under the eaves. Still another, who was up in the heaviest weather, lost nothing. My brother lost his pool enclosure, his big tree and his mother in law.

I'm off to her funeral.

Whee.

Here's the stats: Hours without power- 25; Hours without phone service - 6-10 (I'm not sure when it went off, or when it came back on. But it was on at 9 this morning and off by noon, first phone call came around 7 tonight.)Trees down in my yard - none, branches many. Billboard across the street - down.

But the RLA and I went through Andrew, so we know what to do. Let me rephrase that: I know what to do. I sleep. Deep, profound, glorious sleep such as can only be had in a very dark, very quiet room. Wind and rain do not, in my opinion, constitute noise. Even loud wind and rain. The RLA likes to go out and play in the weather. He even rode his bicycle around the neighborhood yesterday during one of my naps. I also read a wonderful book (just a little bit of a ghost story) by candle light.

We put on the generator, and the koi had air and a working fountain. They were happy.

This morning, I lit the gas stove (not the camp stove, my big ass restaurant style gas stove) using a match, and boiled water in my vintage Michael Graves teapot, and made coffee in the Bodum French press. We are civilized people here, dammit.

And that, friends is how I spent my last 4 days.

As Hurricane Frances bears down on the South Florida coast, giving weathermen* no clue as to where she'll make landfall, I'd like to share some of my family's hurricane history.

1935- Or '34, by the time my father told me this story, he couldn't remember the date. It was the big monster that destroyed the overseas railroad (Flagler's Folly) to the Keys. It was the height of the depression, and there were veterans working on the building the overseas highway. My father was a teenager, and he was recruited in the aftermath of the storm (coincidentally, a Labor Day storm)to help with the clean up. He told me it was horrible. "We were pulling the bodies out of the trees." He always took hurricanes seriously.

1948 or 49 - My brother was a baby, and my parents lived in a little apartment in downtown Stuart. They had to evacuate during the storm. When they came back, the window over my brother's crib had been broken, the lace curtain torn to shreds, neatly braided and a knot tied in the end. By the storm winds. We still have it.

1964 or 65 - My brother goes out after a storm with his buddy on the buddy's motorcycle. They hit debris. My brother destroys his kneecap and is in a hip cast for months. It was the only time he ever got an "A" in phys.ed. He was handing out towels. I'd laugh more, but the only time I ever got an "A" in phys.ed. was the semester I broke a toe and handed out towels. I got the last laugh, though. I later had to have my shoulder repaired due to sports injury.

1969 - I am in marine science summer camp on Big Pine Key. Hurricane Camille passes by Key West on its way to making history and landfall. The camp is almost evacuated, but Camille moves south and west of the Keys. We spend the night in the mess hall. It was great...for us, not so great for Mississippi.

1979 - Still another Labor Day storm, Hurricane David was due to come up the Miami River when I went to bed. I was living in an apartment in the Gables, and had been in a major car wreck the day before. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do to protect myself. I couldn't even put tape on the windows. I just went to bed and hoped for the best. When I woke up, the sun was shining and there were just a couple of tree limbs down. I thought maybe it was the eye of the storm. But no. David had made a sudden, unpredicted turn to the north, scraped the coast, and came ashore in my hometown of Stuart. My friend's parents lost 8 feet of yard from behind their seawall due to storm surge up the St. Lucie River.

1992 - Hurricane Andrew. We were renting a townhouse in what would become known as the devestation zone. The trees on my street were all at a 45 degree angle the next morning. The church around the corner had exploded. The building on the corner had one wall sheared off and desks sticking out of the holes. The 18 wheelers at the moving company were on their sides. The brand new Lincoln Towncar that had been parked in our complex for safety became the Crushed Lincoln Cafe, where we all met and had communal meals for a week or so until the power came back on. I went to work the next day, after the storm hit, and brought ice and water back to my neighbors every day. I also went to Homestead 3 days after the storm, to photograph the delivery of a mobile medical unit to the tent city. The tent city that was next to where the mobile home park had been, up until 3 days prior.

Today, the RLA and I put up the shutters, took in the patio furniture, moved all loose plants against the fences, made sure our hurricane supplies were topped off, bought a couple extra packs of cigarettes, and generally made sure we were ready for the worst. Or as ready as we can be.

These things are monsters, even the little ones, and anyone who lives in Florida and doesn't take them seriously is a fool.
* Sometimes, you DO need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.