Don't Smile At The Baby

When I visited my sister a few years ago in Las Vegas, I apparently said the word Sweet so much around my 7 year old Niece, that she referrers to me as Uncle Sweet. It's sweet until you consider that it sounds like the perfect name for a pimp. The last time I saw her, my niece shouted across the airport, "Uncle Sweet! Uncle Sweet! What did you bring me Uncle Sweet?"
see the problem?
On my next visit I am going to try and use the phrase, "Where's Uncle Sweets cash, little girl?" as much as possible to see what happens.
My poor niece. My poor sister. I am a corrupting influence as an uncle I guess. What do you think, should I show up with a giant hat and fur coat at the airport this time?
"What does Uncle Sweet always say?"
"Wheres my money little girl!"
"Good girl."
"Thanks Uncle Sweet! Did you bring me some sugar?"
Kid's. They say the darnedest things.
My niece was born September 12th, 2001.
That's right, the day after 9/11. It was a powerful reminder that no matter how much grief and hate is poured into the world, life will go on. She is smart, energetic and wants her own way. In short, she is a 7 year old girl growing up. I doubt she has any real idea yet of her birthday's significance. Someday she will though. After all, it's really her world now. Her generation will inherit all of this. All the trouble in the middle east, the fears of global warming, the arguments between philosophy, science and religions- it will all be hers in a future world that frightens and amazes me when I think about it. We have lost the ability to relate to each other on the most fundamental levels. It's all plastic and isolation.

I was sitting at a Borders cafe in Sunnyvale yesterday afternoon surfing the web and drinking coffee. A few tables away a mother and child sat down. The little girl looked at me over the chair and I smiled back. She smiled and ducked her head behind her mothers shoulder. Over the course of a few minuets we played the time honored game of peek-a-boo. Eventually, the mom turned around and smiled at me too.
"Do you have any kid's of your own?" She asked.
"No. Just nieces and nephews."
"Oh." She responded and turned away.
OK. I know I can be very Larry David in these situations and for some reason I always seem to get into some sort of trouble in cafes. But it felt like as soon as I said I didn't have any children of my own, the Mom just tuned me out. Not just that, but I was now someone to be avoided.
Kid's don't carry the baggage of parents at that age. That comes a few years latter. The little girl continued to play peek-a-boo and since I wasn't really doing anything but killing time, I continued too. The mom became more agitated. She turned around and looked at me.
"Could you not do that with her anymore please?"
Alright. God knows I have had enough strange shit go down in public. I simply smiled and said "Sure. No problem."
She turned back around abruptly. Well, that didn't stop the little girl. She and I were in the dark as to what the problem was, but I attempted to become very interested in CNN's top stories-a Illinois shaped corn flake sold for $1,300 on Ebay!-the little girl became upset. She starts crawling on her mom and crying. People look over in that way that says, do you really have to bring a baby in here, sort of way. I try to block it out and just as I am shutting down my lap top to leave, the mom turns around again and says to me, "Would you stop encouraging my daughter?"
"Lady. I am not doing anything. I am leaving and the only reason she is crying is because I stopped smiling and playing peek-a-boo with her."
The Mother now bounces her daughter on her knee and in a shrill voice says to her, "It's alright Ashley, the strange man is leaving. Calm down honey."
What the fuck?
Am I living in a parallel world now? How did I become the bad guy in this situation? What the hell is wrong with this woman?
Of course, this is now being over heard by other people. All they have heard is a baby crying and a woman asking me to stop. Who do you think the scornful eyes fell on?

In a night club once, a fellow comic was standing next to me. When the music paused for an instant before resuming it's normal crushing sensation on our senses, he yelled into the silence, "I'm not gay!"
As the music started up again, people looked at me like I had just made some improper pass at a straight man.
That is the worse feeling, thinking everyone now thinks your a republican.

This was a similar situation. Everyone is looking at me like an Amber Alert had just been issued. I deliberately slow down so I don't look guilty rushing to get out of there. That's my thinking anyway. The little girl is just becoming more agitated while the mother bounces her on her knee with all the warmth one might have with a hacky sack.
"Sorry I offended you somehow?" I say as I pull my bags strap over my shoulder.
The Mother, digging around in her baby bag of bottles, diapers and whatever else you require when you take an infant out, retrieves a pacifier and like a plumber removing a clog from a sink, shoves it in the kids mouth.
Silence.
Here's what happens in the blink of an eye.
The baby bag strap some how becomes entangles in my iPod head phones that are dangling from my bag. I don't notice until I feel the resistance. The Mother doesn't notice until she feels a tugging on the delicately balanced bag of stuff and the baby on her lap. She opens her mouth and says, "We don't want to encourage her to be friendly with male strangers."
That seems like the saddest thing I have ever heard and turn to respond so when my iPod comes out of my bag, hits the floor and comes apart. It pulls her bag of her lap and it too falls to the floor as the baby spits the pacifier out and starts to cry again. The mother and I both reach down at the same time and smash our heads into each other. Wincing in pain, horrified and in shock, we both pull back. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the purposeful strides of an overweight middle manager who is already fed up with whatever it is middle managers always seem to be fed up with, rounding a stack of books and making a beeline toward us.
Shit. Fuck. Damn. Why does this always happen to me?
Why do I even go to cafes anymore?
We don't want to encourage her to talk to male strangers?
What a sad sad world kid's must be growing up in when everyone is eyed as a possible kidnapper or pervert. The baby is in her Mom's lap. She is sitting in a crowded cafe in Sunnyvale. I'm not saying strange shit can't happen, the news is filled with it everyday, but teaching your kid from an early age to not trust seems incredibly wrong to me. It might just be the origin of all the wars and all the misunderstandings society deals with daily.

My mother was the same way. For years it was something of an inside family joke. Anytime we ever went anywhere, mom always had knowledge of something terrible that had happened there.
"Mom, were going to the park."
"Be careful. A girl was raped there not too long ago."
Nice.
Luckily, all of us in the family took it with a grain of salt. It just seemed like such a horrible way to go through life thinking of all the bad stuff that could happen to us. I understand it was coming from a place of concern, but when your 8 and your brother is 9, you really don't need to have rape explained to you and to be on guard against it when your go to the park to hit some balls with a bat. Do you?
This went on for years in our family until even my Mother realized how ridiculous it had become. We are now all adults, but she still reminds us of what unspeakable crime was committed at whatever location we all might be headed too. On the last family Christmas that we all went to church, Mom once again looked out the window of the car and mentioned that a young girl had been the victim of something horrible at the corner. I went into my mothers falsetto voice and said out loud to my brother and sisters, "be careful in the church. A young boy was recently molested by a priest there."
They laughed.
Mom pursed her lips in that way that says she is not inviting anymore conversation on this subject.
My poor Mom. She is not an idiot, but her kid's were always thinking too fast for her to win any of these battles of wit. It only pissed her off more when my father would laugh at something we had said in response. These events always took place in the family car. The four of us kid's would be crammed into the back seat. It was the 70's, so it was a huge couch back there with seat belt buckles that were never used and tucked into the cushion. When Dad would laugh, Mom would just turn to him and give him the look.
The look is also something of a Klocek family inside joke. We can all do an impression of my Mom's look. It lost power on us after about the age of 10. Even dad seemed immune if the joke was funny enough, but it didn't stop her from still using it still.

This manager Dude is doing an almost dead on impression of mom's deeply displeased look.
I am rubbing my head where contact occurred, annoyed pissed off and not giving a shit about how this mess resolves it's self now. The woman is crying, rubbing her head too, and the baby is waling in that way that only a baby can. A woman stands up and comes over to attempt to offer help as the manager reaches us.
"Mam. We are going to have to ask you to leave if you can't keep your baby quiet."
Well here's a turn of events I didn't see coming!
The woman who came over to help, me and the crazy lady who wants to seal her daughter in a jar till she's 18, all look up at the same time.
Yeah. I'm not the bad guy for a change but I sure as hell can't get behind being mad a woman with a baby. As I rub my hand over my forehead, I say, "What?"
"We have had a few people already complain. This is a book store and we like to maintain quiet."
The woman is just a mess now. I feel sorry for her on so many different levels. The helpful bystander has the baby in her arms and is cooing her back into calmness.
"I am sorry." He says to me, "but we do have a policy just like a movie theater."
The woman, her chin quivering, nods her head in understanding and starts to pick up her bag.
Sitting in a chair, I say to the guy, "Don't you think that's a pretty anti-family policy of kicking crying babies out of a store?"
He shrugs his shoulders. In that moment I can see the full weight of abiding by the company line this man has done for years in hopes that someday he will be made store manager. All you need to know about him is contained in that shrug. No questions or allowances for human behaviour, just a strict interpretation of corporate policy.
"You would of made a fine Nazi." I say to him.
Big mistake.
"Alright, your out too. For your information I am Jewish and that deeply offends me!"
What is he going to do? Whip the keys on his key chain at me? Sit on me with the girth that has accumulated over the years of take out food in the break room as eyes the young girls primping in the mirror?
"That's not the intended nature of my insult." I lamely say.
"I don't care what the insult is, but I am not going to have Nazi's brought up to me as I am trying to enforce the rules of our store!"
Do you see the irony, dear reader?
"That's why you would make a good Nazi, you idiot. You are enforcing a rule that has no allowances for the simplest human behaviour like a fucking baby crying!"
By this time security, or an old guy almost as heavy as Mr. Nazi middle management, enters the scene. He has a limp. He has a limp! What kind of security are you getting when your guard is overweight and walks with a limp?
This is truly amazing now. It is at this point that I laugh. I have this habit I suppose of laughing at what seems to be the worst possible moment. But that's why I laugh. This whole fucking mess is so preposterous. From the woman who is raising her new born daughter to not trust, to the manager who can't see past the letter of the law and understand the context of why I am referring to Nazi's, and now a carnival worker with a walki-talki and a limp to escort me and the woman off the premises!
What else can you do but laugh at the universes grand practical jokes?
Course, laughing in the middle of public embarrassment only makes you look more crazy. But at this point, I have abandoned all hope of anyone with reason popping up.
You know how you can pause anything on TV now? Digital recorders and TiVo has made pausing real time shows possible. God how I wish I had that for life's little moments like this so I could explain everything.
Pause-
Alright. Now that I have your attention please listen careful and thoughtfully as I explain to you how you each person misinterpreted, took offense or was just plain wrong about what is happening.
Lady with the baby, I was playing peek-a-boo with your adorable daughter in a friendly non threatening manor the way people do with a smiling bright baby. I was not planing to steal her or fill her head with beliefs that are different from the ones you will spend a life time stuffing down her throat only to come to a realization somewhere in your life that she is her own person and can be trusted to do the right thing.
Manager, first of all, loose some weight. You we feel better about yourself and probably find that once you can see your toes and dick again, you won't feel the need to exert yourself in petty displays of power. I have nothing against Jewish people or their beliefs, but when I said you would make a good Nazi, perhaps I went to far with the analogy, but simply following orders doesn't make for a better world-it makes for a world of less compassion. Babies cry Dude! Deal with it. And if your not gonna loose weight, don't tuck your shirt in. Your belt has to follow the laws of physics, but you don't have to follow the rules when it means giving up a piece of your humanity.
Strangers sitting here pretending like your not loving the hell out of this, your all dicks! This is why the world is such a fucked up place-you people! You people are the vast majority. Your the reason Jerry Springer became a huge hit and Rock of Love has an audience in the millions while PBS has to have fund raising months. You like to watch and take a perverse pleasure in others embarrassment and pain. You could step in and say something. You could come over and say-he was just smiling at your baby lady. Relax- but you don't because that would require effort, interaction, soul, compassion, understanding, and switching off your gee whiz iPhone that you bought right before they dropped the price. Last but not least, where do all these security guards come from? The people at malls and parking lots and campuses who wear a bulked up coat with a badge and drive around in golf carts, look like the very people we want security from! Besides, shouldn't a security guard be in shape if something goes down? What is a 55 year old 200 pound man with a limp going to do? Move out of your moms basement and get back on methadone my friend.
Pause off-
Me, the woman and the baby are walked to the front door. We have to go slowly, otherwise the guard would fall behind. When we get to the door, the lady looks at me and attempts a smile. I smile back and step out into the bright blue sky of suburbia America. Everything is orderly and in it's place.
The neatly parked cars shine with fresh wax between the yellow lines of the smooth blacktop parking lot. Young girls showing off slightly sun browned shoulders stride in and out of the yogurt shop. People confidently walk into the air conditioned confines of a Starbucks. Everything is perfect and everyone is right.
Plastic and isolation.

The Scale of Things

A friend and fellow blogger wondered why I didn't post anything on the anniversary of the war. Since I am so political, he thought it odd I had not posted something.
I forgot.
I have been so busy with everything going on in my life that I simply forgot. Just like a few million other people in this country.
The truth is, it's not so hard to forget about something that has essentially become wallpaper. Getting to work, paying bills and dealing with the drama of just being alive is enough. A war that has waged on starts to fade into the background as a million kid's ask their mothers, "What's for dinner?"
A bomb went off and killed 23 people in downtown Bagdad. 4 more American soldiers died today. A helicopter was shot down. Grenades were launched into the green zone. 12 Iraqi children were killed in an accidental bombing. A convoy of American trucks was blown up.
It all happens a million miles away a million times a day. But it doesn't happen to you. It doesn't happen to us. It doesn't happen here.
When you start to contemplate it all, it's just depressing. That's what it is to millions of people in this country; something that is simply depressing. A subject to be avoided in conversation. A radio update to turn the dial on. The perfect time to go to the bathroom during the news.

In the 80's, we grew up against the back drop of nuclear annihilation. It was in our music, movies and news papers constantly. Like a noise, it wouldn't go away. But then, it just did. Most of those bombs haven't gone anywhere. Sure, we disassembled a symbolic few. Russia did too. But there are still enough Nuclear warheads in existence to destroy the world 20 times over.
What happened?
9/11 happened.
It's terrorism now. This is our national boogieman. However you want to define it, terrorism's physical destruction is nothing compared to what two nations devoted 50 years of resources toward. All that machinery has been turned in the direction of an enemy that can never kill millions of people with the turn of a few keys and the press of a button.
Of course, that is the fear now isn't it- that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb.
We have gone from being terrified of complete destruction with thousand of bombs, to becoming paranoid patriotic warriors looking into peoples carry on luggage for that one bomb.
The scale of destruction has diminished as the fear has increased ten fold.
Why?
How?
Where did the last 5 years go?
What are we doing in Iraq?
Has it made us safer?
These are questions far larger than any one persons thoughts or any one groups beliefs. But think about that for a moment- the scale of damage to people and property has gone down while the scale of terror has gone up. It has gone up because our leaders have not only allowed it to go up, they have actively encouraged it as a means to achieve their agenda.
The agenda is control.
Their agenda and the enemy's agenda is about control.
Religion is control, oil is control, FEAR IS CONTROL.

America, the nation that defined what progress and strength was since it's birth invaded the wrong country for something they didn't do. Ever seriously mediate on that? Put it in personal terms for a second. A guy that didn't have a gun came up to us. Us. The big bad bully on the world wide playground with abb's of steel and strapping' a bad ass hand gun we wave around like a drunk on New Year's. This little guy comes up to us while were standing on a bar stool telling everyone how cool we are and breaks a bottle over our head. It's one guy with one bottle. The room goes quiet in shock and horror while the sound of one laugh rings out in the air.
We turn around and Saddam is the only one laughing.
You know what happened next.
It happens everyday a million times a day all over the world.

The war happened on the world stage though. It happened for a million of those reasons we will never completely understand. What makes a man decide the only way to make a difference in the world is to devote his soul to flying a plane into a building igniting fear and war among two vastly different ways of belief?
I don't know.
We do know that Iraq, has been devastated on the scale of a Nuclear blast. We know that fear rules our lives in a way it didn't seem too during the cold war. Maybe that's the difference, the scale of things. The idea of a Nuclear holocaust was so beyond the scope of our comprehension that we could only imagine it in the movies. Maybe that's why on 9/11 the thing I heard people say the most was, "it's like something out of a movie."
5 years ago, America invaded Iraq on a lie. I doubt anyone said to themselves, "This is like a movie."
It's all about the scale and distance of things. Iraq is a disaster on a scale Americans have just never really had to face. It is as far away as the button on the remote, yet a hemisphere away. It has gone on longer than anyone ever thought it would and it never had to happen. It has been 5 years since the invasion. You cannot measure it or define it on any scale that means anything. The only scale that really matters is the human one. It's the kid filled with red white & blue that returns after three tours missing a limb and wondering what was won. It's the kid blown up in a suicide bombers fire. It's not the trillions of dollars yet to be printed that actually matter, it's those human beings on each side of this who have been living it for 5 years.

Race, Obama & 9/11

Here is what White Christian leaders believe was the cause of 9/11. It's funny how once these clips started making the rounds again that people didn't care what Obama's Minister said about 9/11. Now, it's just about race.
It's also interesting how they blame America for not being religious enough when the "enemy" that came to our shores that day had been created by a steady diet of nothing but religion.



This is what Obama's Minister's said. The line I love the most comes at the end and says it all. "Hilary has never been called by her own people, not white enough." Like it or not, America has a long way to go on race relations.



If were not going to vote for a guy because of the people around him, lets remember that John McCaine has a guy on his reelection committee who is involved with the aerospace company attempting to take over the maker of voting machines; Diebolt.

A Rant

Enough!
Mediocrity leaves an after taste. What we get is what we deserve. No more forgiveness for the ass holes we are besieged by. Everyone wants understanding but no one knows how to give it. The human heart is under attack in a way so complete and so vicious that it is unmatched by any other other time in history. Love is a hoax played on us by the angeles. Regret is just fine as long as you don't let it solidify into the waxy ghosts that slow your blood. That girl, the one you want will make you happy for one year, two months and a day before whatever it is that brought you together fades. Do what you love and the money will go down that hole. Realistic is a club they use to beat you down. Fuck spelling and grammar -you know what I mean. Sleeping pills and strong coffee give you a life lived like a badly edited movie.
Helicopters are too loud. Old people really do remember an easier time. What will you do when everything around you changes and all the music on the radio is sung in the accent of youth. I once was a man that cast two shadows, one for me and one for the girl I still thought was beside me. Anarchy, like democracy is messy. How about Zen-achy? People who flush the toilet before their done are always in a hurry at everything they do. The real miracle about Jesus was that a white guy with perfect abb's was born in an Arab country. Gold seldom makes a man silent. Why does that metaphor work in the other direction? Show me all the ink blots you want doc, I am still going to say you need a pen that doesn't leak. Love is all you need. Really? Fake it till you make it. In the end, she did to me what her parents did to her. It doesn't comfort me in anyway, but I know it must stay with her like a nail in the head and for that I smile even though it does nothing for my karma. Politics should not be played as a sport. Mac's are better than PC's. If I had the money I would build a light house somewhere in Kansas just to have people come by and ask why. Everything screams at you to conform. There are some notes played on a piano that feel like damp splinters being pulled from the ripe flesh of a first broken heart. She was neither young or foolish, she was cruel. When I was drinking, everything seemed so God Damn poignant. pain is like shit, things you never thought will grow from it. Nosterdomus and Duran Duran were both big in their day. No one dates anymore. Where ever light comes through in slanted shafts, that's a church. Money only buys paper work, a little more security and the fear that something will happen to it. God so loved us that he sent his only child to die. You ever really think about how fucked up that is? My father once sent me out in a snow storm to get coffee for the neighbors and I never forgave him for that. oblivion is the perfect vacation. I once was in love with a girl whose skin was the color of an approaching thunder storm. It was smooth like the petals of a rose too. I never thought was for real when I read it. Just a finger tip run along her arm sent an electric thrill all over my body. I once had a girlfriend who got angry at me every two months because I didn't tell her I loved her. I once had a girlfriend who I pledged everything too. It was easier than you think when the most precious thing in your life was her. I once broke up with a girlfriend in a cafe thinking it would minimize the drama factor. I was wrong about that. She stood up from the table and shouted, "I don't want to date you either! and ran out like a scene in a movie. It was so quiet. Not even a fork on a plate or ice moving in a glass could be heard. The waiter came over and in a combination of pity and genuine enjoyment raised his eye brows and simply asked, "Check?"
I once did nothing but ecstasy for weekends at a time in hotel rooms with a girl who was part Korean and part French. It sounds like a novel you might read in an airport because your bored. After awhile even the most amazing sex got boring. I saw her again on one of the most awkward gig's I ever did. She was over weight and engaged so everything felt fair in a fucked up way. All of this is bullshit on some level. If a train leaves Chicago at midnight traveling at 60 MPH and has to get to Denver in less than 15 hours, should it wait for time travel to be invented or just trudge upon those shinny rails like everyone else? Someone told me my name is part of a sign for a show on busses around town. Wow! Do you know what that means? Everyday thousands of people look at my name and go, "Who?" I keep my pain from her. I want to let it go. Not because it's all I have left to remember her by, but because it requires a tremendous amount of work to get rid of it. All great comedy comes from the same place.
Scientist say there are traces of pharmaceutical in our drinking water. That's great. Most of America can't afford prescription drugs anyway, so now we can all get medicine. I have never understood why there are high altitude baking instructions.

EPIC!

Have you ever asked people what kind of super powers they would like? I have always said I would like the power of flight and invisibility. Of course, human nature being what it is, I might not fight crime with those abilities-I would be crime!
Last night after a show I am having flap jacks with two comics. Both of them are attractive women. The one woman says, "I would have the power to get men to do things."
You already have that power. It's called a vagina.
"I think our powers should be based on some ability we already have." She tells me.
OK, but you can already achieve that, I explain. She considers this for a moment and then says, "I could find a sale anywhere!"
Really? That's a super power? How is that going to fight crime?
Some one help! My baby has been kidnaped!
"There's a sale on diapers!"
My God! This man is going to stab me!
"Mail in rebate for $100!"
None of these things fights crime. Besides, how are you going to get there? I have flight! What if the sale is somewhere across town? You can't jump on Muni wearing a cape. Well, OK I have seen that but I doubt very much they were headed somewhere to fight crime.
"I got this cape on sale!"
Good for you!
Alright, if the super power has to be based on something we already have, then mine would have to be sarcasm. This might actually work though.
"Sure. Go ahead and steal all that money. I'm sure you will be happier once you do."
My mother had this ability. All it ended up achieving is a son who thinks about committing crime. I guess it back fired.
The other woman, who has been sitting silent eventually says, "telaportation."
Ok, That's a super hero power. You could legitimately fight crime with that ability. Or, once again, be crime. There is no safe super power you could choose that couldn't also be used for evil.
I guess that's our lesson for today kid's.
I know, I have been very serious lately. A suicide under your roof will do that. All we really have to deal with life is a sense of humor, metaphors and religions. All of them seem a bit lacking to me right now. You want to hear the biggest cliche there is?
When I went to bed last night I was 20. This morning when I woke up, I was 39 years old still waiting for life to begin. How about that? Denial is not a super power, but the way I do it it is.
In everything that has been going on, there has been movement beneath the surface. I feel it even if I don't want to.
If your 20, hold on to it. Because even though I use to roll my eyes at it too, I did just wake up and find 20 years has passed me by. What the hell have I been waiting for?
I have nothing on my walls. No framed photos of friends and family, no awards or posters. Just bare plaster staring back at me. Why? You know why, I keep waiting for someday.
Someday with the right girl, the right job, the right moment. But the more I think about this the more people have been helping to fill in the blanks. Sometimes without meaning to. What ever life it is you want, you can't wait for it to find you. You have to go out into the world and make it. Hows that for the most obvious statement of the ages?
Being on stage lately hasn't felt right. There is this sensation in my chest that tells me something is off. I feel it. I hate it. Whatever it is I need to deal with in life has started to fuck with me in the one place I care the most about. Stand-up is the one constant in my life. Now, it too is being smudged with the finger prints of a thousand irritable ghosts. So now what?
I gotta tell you, that facebook post that had the photo of the F-15 fighter jet and Jesus really bothered me. It's that sort of casual mixing of complete opposites that makes us a very strange country. You see it all the time too. We have Amber alerts for missing children, programs to make sure predators are kept away from our kids yet we let young girls walk around in tight fitting sweat pants with the word juicy stenciled across their ass.
I got totally busted checking out a girls ass the other day. She turned around and yelled, "What do you think your doing?"
"I'm a slow reader." I said.
Yeah, it's funny. It made her laugh, but come on. You know you have a perfect ass. That's why you put on something that looks like it was spray painted on. Then you have the nerve to yell when someone looks? Come on. I have 2 million years of instinct and four inches of wood in my pants; of course I am going to look! You don't get angry at a fish when it takes the bait, do you?
My God. it sounds like I am attempting to justify horrible behavior from guys. I'm not. It's just cause and effect.
Pretty girl in hot pink pants stretched across her perfect ass-I look.
Again, it's this complete lack of seeing how we make society schizophrenic that is getting us all into trouble.
Yes. I notice young girls. How can you not? They are all over every bit of advertising, porn is e-mailed to you, and they walk around malls emulating what they see as self empowering sensuality. All you have to do is look no farther than Brittney Spears to see how that can end up.
Cause and effect.
OK, you want a less creepy example?
The mortgage crisis we are in right now. People borrowed money they really couldn't aford with loans they didn't really understand and now they want the government to step in and re-write the terms of those home loans.
The loans might as well have had the words juicy written in bold letters across them. I'm not saying that there wasn't a lot of predatory lending going on, cause there was. But come on. Course, this is the same government that doesn't put the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupation in the official military budget. Why bother, someone else will deal with it someday.
Back to me.
That's the kind of thinking that has kept me in this holding pattern for a while now. America too. We want change but are afraid to pick a direction. It's the same thing but on vastly different scales.
Should I look for an apartment down in the mission like I have always wanted?
Should we pull out of iraq?
What will happen if I have to get a new car?
What will happen to oil prices if we leave Iraq?
Will this comedy festival be the big break I have been waiting for?
Will another terrorist attack on America mean the war failed?
We are all in the same leaky boat my friends.
Did I tell you about the festival?
I got a call from Eddie Brill. if your a comic you know who that is. He is the Comedy Booker for the David Letterman show. I am not on the show. Yet. I have been invited to attend the first Comedy festival in Johnny Carson's home town of Norfolk, Nebraska. Yeah. Nebraska. It is a huge opportunity. An opportunity to get in-front of industry. How ironic would it be if the first big break in my career came in the middle of a corn field?
I don't have all the details yet, but there has already been talk of money and management. It's time to practice what I preach. Being on stage is the tip of the ice burg. It is everything you do off stage that really insures you will have a great set. For me, that means getting some kind of connection to a power greater than myself. It means getting out of my own head and doing something besides think of what I have and don't have.
The ultimate super power would be time travel. No matter what happened, you could know what happened.
I don't know what will happen. The tip of the ice burg will take care of its self provided I take care of myself. No super power or special talent required. I just want to be a happy adult.
Maybe the best way to get rid of those ghosts is to put a picture up on my own wall in a place I chose to live in.

Crazy people with churches

The game is on!
Barack has been pretty untouchable. They have to keep looking for stuff or insinuating stuff to try and slow him down. Now comes this. An excerpt from Jeremiah Wright, Barack's pastor of 20 years.

"Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain't never been called a [n-word].

Hillary is married to Bill. And Bill has been good to us. No, he ain't. Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty.

The government gives him the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing "God Bless America." No, no, no. Not "God Bless America." God damn America. That's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human.

We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed in Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon. And we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans. And now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now been brought right back into our own front yard."

America has funded groups that other governments consider terrorists. America has overthrown governments that were put in place by democratic elections. America has bullied countries with the threat of military intervention. Those are just facts. It is the height of arrogance to think that it would never come back at us someday. Every credible expert now believes that 9/11 was a direct result of our foreign policy. Before you go ape shit conservatives, I'm not saying this justifies what was done on that day, it is just a clear eyed assessment of actions and reactions.
As for the other stuff about HIV? I don't think the Government invented it, but they sure as hell did nothing to prevent it for a long time. I'm not black, but let's not kid ourselves white America, black people have a very different relationship with America than we do. What you might see as paranoid delusions, are commonly held ideas based on that relationship.
The prison population is largely black. Are they more violent than white people? No. The law is not always applied evenly though. Powder cocaine, the one favored by rich white people, is illegal of course, but rock cocaine, favored by black people, carries a mandatory prison sentence almost three times longer than the powder form. Explain that?
Besides, we have our share of crazy white preachers. Case in point, Pat Robertson just called Yoga spooky. Watch for yourself.

You have to love the fact that this little clip hits so many buttons. The e-mailed questions segment is called, Bring it on. A direct connection to one of Bush's bigger missteps. Remember when he was asked at the start of the war about terrorists rushing to Iraq to fight our military. His jock answer, "Bring it on!"
The question it's self is pure rhetoric. Before even being answered, the viewer has already heard the word Yoga attached to the idea that it has it's origin in evil. Then, he goes on to essentially degrade another religion that is practiced by a much larger population than Christians.
So Obamas ministers said some inflammatory things. Pat Robertson blamed 9/11 on the Gays, abortionists and pagans. If I'm not mistaken, he said America deserved it for allowing those people to exist in our country. He isn't even blaming our foreign policy, he is blaming Americans for 9/11 right here! This is just one reason that John McCaine referred to the religious preachers in the conservative party as, "agents of intolerance." That's not me saying that, that's McCaine.

An Eye for an Eye

Only two defining forces have ever offered
to die for you:

1. Jesus Christ
2. The American G. I.
One died for your soul, the other for your freedom.
YOU MIGHT WANT TO PASS THIS ON,
AS MANY SEEM TO FORGET BOTH OF THEM. AMEN!

This was a post from a "friend" on Facebook. Do you really think Jesus, wants us to be using a billion dollar weapon to kill in his name? Don't you think we could use the money to feed and clothe people? I don't recall reading anywhere in the new testament a time when Jesus said, drop bombs on your enemy from 30,000 feet. Do you? I have nothing against the military or Jesus, but combining the two is not only absurd, it's dangerous. You can either kill or work for peace. You cannot put the two together. History has taught us that when an army believes God is on their side, they are capable of doing the most extreme and godless acts known to man. Why do you think a suicide bomber can do what they do; they have God on their side.
It doesn't matter who fires the first shot or with what weapon they are using. If both sides are killing then there is NO difference in what they ultimately stand for. It's the same as people wearing large gold crosses that cost thousands of dollars. You are missing the point.
This is the schizophrenic ideology of America. Like the Romans before us, we fight to expand our empire secure in the knowledge that we are on the side of good. Problem is, invoking the name of Jesus to do so is beyond ignorant and vastly arrogant. I don't know who said it, but an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
It is because of the morally corrosive nature of religion that our founding fathers saw fit to make us a nation of laws and not a nation of religion. If you want to see the danger of what a country run by a single religion looks like, then look no farther than the people we buy our oil from.

Were Number One!

America has more people behind bars than any other nation on the planet!
Way to go. Were number one!
1 in 99 adults is in prison.
Dear everyone at Fox news, we might be a Christian nation as you constantly say, but we seem to have forgotten how to forgive.
If we built new schools at the rate we build new prisons, maybe someone smart enough would come along with a better idea .
Then again, when the first guy came along to seriously preach forgiveness, they killed him.
We don't need a new idea.
We just need people to remember.
This message brought to you by the makers of logic, and the People Involved Socially, Systematically, Offering Forgiving Futures.
or,
P.I.S.S.-O.F.F.

"I can talk about his passion."

I have known Mike for as long as I have been in Comedy. We have fallen in and out of touch with each other over the years. After my break up with Samantha, I stayed at my brothers house in Lafayette. Eventually, it just made sense to move back into the city. It was suppose to be temporary, but I have stayed because it is cheap.
Mike was the one who told me about the place.
We are room mates, but never really see each other anymore. We talk outside when we run into each other, but that's about it.
I have known the guy for more than 15 years.
He called me today. One of the other room mates in the house killed himself.
I hardly knew the man. He was always smoking when I saw him. Frail, as thin as a stick, I usually saw him sitting in his car out front smoking with a look on his face that said he wasn't there. Not crazy, just some place else.
I saw him this morning at 7:30 when I was rushing out the door to cover a shift at the day gig. We nodded politely to each other as we always did.
That was the last time I saw him alive.
I didn't even know his name till Mike told me.
I keep asking myself what I should feel? I listened to Mike on the phone. He had been dealing with the Police all morning and was understandably shaken up. After we got off the phone with each other, I sat back down at a table in a cafe, put my iPod ear buds back in and checked for messages on Myspace.
Now, a few hours later, I am at a Starbucks in Napa killing time before a show and all I can think about is the pain in Mikes voice when he was explaining the situation to me.
I can't imagine the pain either of these men felt today. I have thought of suicide. After the whole Samantha mess, it crossed my mind on more than one occasion. But I never got to that place in side myself where it became an eventuality. You know? It did for this man.
He handed Mike a money clip and two letters, went into his room and a few moments later, Mike heard the gun shot.
My God.
I just sat back down and thought about what I needed to get done today and how tired I am going to be tomorrow.
Is that cold?
My life has become so busy lately. Shows, teaching, day job-I don't know where to put everything I need to get done. Friends? I have a few people that I would consider close, but my first impulse for anything is to just retreat inside myself. Isolate, bare the pain and hope it will pass.
It never does. Not really.
When I was driving up to Napa, I called Mike to check on him. Still shaken, still that tone of voice I hope to never hear in another persons voice again, he was going to try and sleep. When I put the phone down and really looked at what was just scenery on the way to another gig, I thought how beautiful it was. The hills, the vines that look like open hands tied to their polls, it was beautiful. Those trees that flower for a few weeks at the start of spring were in bloom everywhere. I rolled my window down and inhaled. It always makes me think of being young when I see those trees. The smell filled the air. Instead of car exhaust and urine, the air was fresh with their scent. It was good to be out of the city.
What should I feel?
What should I feel for a man I never had more than a token, how are you, with? I could see he was a shadow. Anyone could look and see he was broken. He was a bare light bulb hanging from a cord over an unmade bed.
I understand what it is to be trapped in your own private world of regret.
I avoided him for that. I recognized to much of myself in his sunken eye's.
He smoked like it would rid him of the ghosts you knew were hanging around him. He was always leaning against the gate, the door or the wall. Always looking down at his feet and always awkward. I understand that the most.
To be so awkward, so stuck in your head but to want someone to reach inside and just get it, I understand that. Truth is, no one ever really can. You want it to be that lover, or your father, or a friend, but it is always best described by something you keep to yourself. A favorite song, a movie, a book. But it is something you never really tell anyone else.
What should I feel?
It feels like I have asked myself that all my life. All I can think is that the answer he gave himself was that he was tired of trying.
When people say, suicide is selfish, I never really got it. Now I do.
Mike heard the gun and ran down stairs and found him.
Can you imagine that?
Mike told me it will be with him forever. I believe that. How could it not be?
That's what makes it selfish. Someone has to deal with it after your gone.
Mike was this mans only real friend. He trusted him with the money and the letters.
I ask Mike how he is doing and he says, "I am mad, I am angry but mostly, I miss my friend."
When I turn onto the last road that leads to down town Napa, I look at a familiar stretch of road. Cynthia and I use to come up here for weekends when we lived together.
20 years has gone by. 20 years since I saw a woman I thought I would go through forever with.
Where does the time go? All that stuff that was suppose to happen that didn't. Why do I hold onto it like stones in my pocket? What was this man holding onto that he couldn't let go of? What brand of pain must he have had? What brought him to this end now?
I think of Samantha of course, some where else with someone else and I realize that I had learned nothing from the first woman I lived with 20 years ago. There is no one person in my life that knows all my truth. Do you know what I mean by that?
Everyone has a piece of a story that I want them to have. Some of the story people have is more fiction than fact too. But there is not a single other human being I have ever really trusted with all of who I am.
I am guessing, but I don't think this man did either. How odd to have something so intimate and in common with someone you thought of as a stranger. A stranger under the same roof.
It doesn't really mater what I am suppose to feel. It's not my story nor my grief. I think too much about me anyway. Maybe not in an outright selfish way, but it is in a way. All the energy I put into avoiding not just conflict, but connection tells people I don't trust them. Truth is, I am just afraid. Afraid of everything any human being is afraid of.
This man had enough. He was worn out by all the unanswered questions that lead to a fear that takes hold of you like cancer.
If there is a God, I cannot possibly believe he is cruel enough to keep this mans punishment going in the afterlife.
For him, it's over. For Mike, it is just starting.
I do the gig in a bar where the noise is like a physical presence. The entire back of the room is disconnected from the show and just try to speak louder and louder over the comics.
I end up doing way too much time, but it was therapeutic.
I get in my car and Mike calls me. He is drunk now and tells me he picked a fight with one of the other roommates in the house. The guy didn't think it was all that big of a deal.
People never loose the ability to surprise me with their callousness.
Why would anyone say anything like that to Mike right now? It didn't come to blows, but grief and vodka mix in such a way that lashing out becomes a reflex your only aware of after the fact. That's how I remember it anyway.
We talk on the phone as I drive. We talk about putting together some kind of a memorial service. Something to mark his life with dignity. Mike says something that is so sweet and so profound it catches me off guard. "I can talk about his passion."
I cannot think of a better way for any of us to be remembered than to have a friend do exactly that, talk about my passion.
When I pull up in my car, Mike is outside with another roommate, an unlit cigarette in his hand, and stumbling between a lamp post and a parked car. I take a breath. It has already been a long weekend, but this has nothing to do with me.
I hug Mike. As soon as I do he starts crying and because we are men and no matter what the lifetime channel tell us, he stops as abruptly as he began.
"I'm sad." Is all he says with a slur.
I ask him when was the last time he ate. Maybe two, he thinks. It is now almost one in the morning.
The other roommate and I convince him that eating something would be good. We climb into my car and head to the Lucky Penny on Masonic and Geary. Open all night and a weigh station for lost souls, it seem like the perfect place to sit in a booth, eat some greasy food and talk.
This other roommate, Bill is a character. All he orders is a Coke he never took a sip from and a plate of well done fries. He picks up each fry one by one, dips it in ketchup, and eats it down to where his finger tips grasp it like an insect. Instead of putting the last little bit of fry into his mouth, he places these fry butts on the table next to his plate.
I am listening to Mike, he is laughing about other times spent here, but I can't take my eyes off those one inch fry butts. What the hell Dude? I keep my mouth shut about it. All he keeps talking about is how good the meals are at the Lucky Penny. Then, without warning, as mike is laughing, he asks if he has ever had to deal with something like this before. I have never seen such a dramatic change in a person happen so swiftly, so completely. The sadness struck Mike like a hammer blow. I thought he was going to throw up. He pushed his omelet plate back and shook where he sat. I could of reached across the table and hit this guy! What's going on with the pile of fry butts too?
Mike answers with a solemn no and looks down at the plate of food.
When we get back to the house, we all stand there for a moment. Mike lights a cigarette and tells us we can go in to bed. He will be OK. We each ask if he is sure, but I get the feeling he wants to be alone for a moment to stand in the spot he use to hang out with his friend. Reluctantly, I head up the stairs to the front door. That's when I see the trail of blood drops and what appears to be cotton gauze or a bandage. That's when it becomes real for me. That's when I can feel it in the pit of my stomach. It's a paper cut compared to what Mike must be dealing with. There is already a pile of belongings sitting outside his door and an official warning sticker on his room's door.
Today I tried to find Mike some help. A grief counselor an emergency therapist, something. Here is what amazes me. There is nothing. If Mike had witnessed a rape or homicide, if he had been a victim of a violent crime, the police would have given him a card with a number on it. But for a friend of a suicide, there is nothing. No emergency number or website or professional help. Nothing.
How do I feel?
I feel sad for my friend and angry at the gapping hole in our mental health care system.
But what is really important is how Mike feels.
Out of the blue, another friend called me while I sat in my car before the gig. I told him everything. He said the perfect thing. "You are not responsible for the bad in the world. All you can be is responsible for the good you put into it."

Am I a Nut, or....

America, remember it?
The army field manuel lists 19 technics that can be used. It also states very clearly that harsh interrogation is a "poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the (interrogator) wants to hear."
Bush vetoed a Bill today that would of banned water-boarding.
That sends a nice message to the world. Don't you think?
When asked last week what he thought about the possibility of gas rising to $4.00 a gallon by spring, he replied, "I haven't heard that."
Nice to see he is keeping up on things.
Like a kid who knows the summer break is coming soon, he doesn't even have to pretend like he gives a shit anymore.
" A vote against McCane is a vote for the terrorists."
That's what my Dad says anyway.
Really? Hey, if they don't listen to a guy with the middle name of Hussein, who will they listen too? Cause I don't know if you have noticed or not, but the bombs and bullets don't seem to be working.
The Republicans, their philosophy and their programs have absolutely failed in every way.
Every way!
Oil is at an all time high of $104 a barrel.
The Dollar has never been in worse shape and the value of a typical American's home has dropped by 50% in some parts of the country.
We are occupying a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or had weapons of mass destruction at the cost of a Billion dollars a week while the budget for next year has cut millions of elderly from the drug prescription program and veterans care.
All this done by a man who claims Jesus as his saviour?
I'm not worried about the terrorists who are Muslim. I'm worried about the moral equivalent of war that has been declared on the average American while Bush sleeps at the wheel.
That's what it is too, the moral equivalent of war.
What else can you call it?
When I point this out to Dad, he simply repeats back, "9/11!"
That was seven years ago. If someone had been paying attention to other things just as important as fighting terrorists, we might not be so fucked at the moment.
9/11?
It didn't work for Rudy, and it simply won't work to blame all our troubles on it anymore.
Who gives a shit about flag pins and experience? Seriously. Rome is burning and people want to make a big deal out of Obama's middle name? Go for it. But when you lose that job and the house payments are getting higher and higher, are you going to yell at the bank, "9/11!"
I don't think so.

Diebold Inc., maker of automated teller machines, security systems and voting machines, was the recent target of an unsolicited $2.63 billion takeover offer from United Technologies Corporation, a leading aerospace defense contractor.
The NY Times editorial board sees a problem with a defense contractor, that has a strong corporate interest in the outcome of presidential elections, having any role in the counting of votes, should the takeover succeed.
Look, call me a conspiracy nut if you want, but in all honesty would you feel comfortable with a company that makes billions of dollars in profit as long as were at war controlling the very tool of Democracy?
Do you know what the actual definition of fascism is? It is the Government and corporations working together. How did the Fascist keep control of the population in days past? Spies, intelligence gathering on it's own citizens and passing laws that enabled the corporations to do what they wanted at the expense of the greater good of the people.
Well, lets see.
We are spying on our own citizens, Corporations get what amounts to welfare on a scale that has never been seen before in the history of the world and the common man, you and I, are getting a $300 check in the mail to stimulate a flagging economy. Just to tell us about this wonderful news, the Government is spending 45 million dollars to send letters out telling us if we qualify for these checks.
Give me a fucking break!
Go to sleep America. American Idol is on soon. Go get a frapachinno down at Starbucks. Relax. We have it under control. Your kids will have less of a chance at the "American Dream" than you did, but it's OK. There will always be the sweet Novocaine of VH1, MTV and FOX.
Shhhh!
Look at Brittney and Lindsy. Those crazy kids!
Vote? Why bother.
Indeed.

LOL!

This is what it has come too?
Our modern society is turning into a bad comedy sketch. In London, people who have been walking and texting at the same time have walked into so many lamp posts that a phone directory service much like our 411 have decided to take action.
They are experimenting with padded lampposts.
Yeah. You read correctly.
Padded lamp posts for people trying to find the right emo-con but instead hit their heads on a post.
LOL!
A study conducted by the phone directory service, found that one in 10 people has been hurt while focusing on their cell phone instead of where they were walking.
The survey found that almost two thirds of respondents lost peripheral vision while texting, and more than a quarter wanted lines on the pavement to create routes for texters to walk while using their phones.
Lines on the pavement? Like were trying to find the gift shop in a hospital?
If I am texting and walking down the street but not on a blue line, will I get a ticket for texting in the wrong lane? How ridiculous are we going to become? All this communication technology available to us and no one seems any more "available" than before we had all this.

The directory service will provide the padding and allow companies to advertise on them.
That's great marketing. Do you really want people to run into a post, look up and associate your product with an embarrassing moment in public? Aspirin might be the best product to run adds for. Or insurance.
How about this; Hey moron, put the stupid phone down and actually communicate with the people around you!
I speak to people less. When my phone buzzes, it's usually a text message. E-mail is easier to send because why not send something passive aggressive that I don't have to be there for to see your reaction. The other day I got a letter. An actual hand written stamp on the envelope letter. My room mates stood around looking at it in awe like the Nazi's stared at the ark at the end of Indiana Jones. This ended better of course. Still, I told them to keep their eyes closed no matter what.

There is a new product for older people who don't want the hassle of "buying an expensive and hard to learn computer." They hook this thing up to their phone and now any e-mail or text their grand kid's send, gets printed out on a large easy to read piece of paper.
We have come full circle.
Still, it better come with an up to date dictionary of terms. What is grandma and grandpa going to make of the letters OMG! printed out in giant letters?

All this technology and the only thing we seem able to do is keep each other at a distance. I am waiting for the day when you can beam a copy of yourself with all your memories and knowledge over to a persons, Communication Room. Something like a digital clone that lives for you in the vast Internet ocean of non-Einstein physics and instant gratification. The Matrix isn't all that far away. Can you see it? I can. At a certain age, you lay down in a sensory deprivation chamber. You are hooked up to the outside world and interact with anyone on the planet in anyway you can imagine. Avatars roaming the uncharted digital universe where anything is possible and everyone is anonymous. Only the poor will walk with actual legs in the actual reality. The rich and famous will live in a new world built exclusively for their whims. People will take vacations entrusting their bodies to technicians for a week as they fly around the fantasy land we are headed for, their bodies nourished intravenously. Maybe even throw some drugs into the mix and you have a future that no longer reaches out to explore the solar system and beyond, but one of intense navel gazing where growing up never has to happen. All you will need is money. That part never seems to change.

A Pure San Francisco Moment.

As much as liberals bug the hell out of me, the conservative mindset just boggles me. I am sitting out side at a café in the city. Next to me, a man reads his paper and smokes. Smoking doesn’t bother me as much as it bugs a lot of people in this city. As long as I am up wind or outside, have at it.My cell phone rings. A friend asks me if I have heard about Charlie, the dog from Iraq. Apparently, it is against the uniform code of military justice to keep a pet on base. But since a bunch of Marines took a liking to him, they contacted the SPCA and with some cloak and dagger nonsense and positive PR, the dog was flown to the U.S. to live his life out in freedom. I wish we could say the same for the people of Iraq.

When I get off the phone I can already feel this guy staring a hole into me.
“My father served in the Marines.”
Here we go.
“That’s great.” I say before going back to my notebook.
In classic San Francisco café etiquette, the people around us go silent waiting for the entertainment to start. Café conversations in this town is what NASCAR is to the south. You enjoy them and find them interesting, but if something goes horribly wrong and it ends with sparks and a crash; cool!
“I don’t appreciate what you said.” He tells me looking straight into my eyes.
“You don’t appreciate what? That you overheard my conversation and a fact?”
His eyes narrow and then in a wonderful display of intelligent debate, he blows a huge cloud of cigarette smoke into my face. I don’t cough. I’m use to it. The two women I have lived with were both chain smokers and most of the places I do comedy in allow you to smoke. I just stare back and say, “I will take your second hand smoke if you take my second hand knowledge.”
A guy a few tables away giggles slightly and a girl not really reading a book since this started smiles widely.
He makes a big theatrical production out of folding his Wall Street Journal up before storming off.
I don’t appreciate what you said.
What is supposed to be my reply to that? Sorry, stranger I have offended without knowing it. Teach me to ignore facts and shape my beliefs to the agenda you are willing to defend in the face of overwhelming proof.
It always starts the same with these guys too. It’s either, I was in the military or my father was in the military or my son is in the military. Great. I have never said anything negative about military service. My brother was in the Army.
Starting a conversation about the war by saying, my father was in the military, is not only a cheap way to attempt grabbing the moral high ground, it is the equivalent of having a discussion on race where a white guy starts by saying, I have a black friend.
I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.
The girl with the book points to the table he was at and says, “He forgot his phone!”
Awesome!
The guy who giggled walks over to it, picks it up and says, “lets call some place like Iran and leave a message that will sound like code!”
You have to laugh at this idea. We all know there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The FBI just said yesterday that they improperly accessed millions of Americans private data on line in 2006. This would absolutely set off some bells in the basement of the Pentagon.
The man returns though.
He rounds the corner just in time to see the kid holding his cell phone. The guy freaks!
“Thief! Stop Thief!” He starts yelling.
The kid, out of sheer panic, slams it back down on the table and walks backwards inside the café. People on the street are looking around expecting to see a purse-snatcher or armed robbery in progress. All they see is a skinny kid looking like he is shitting his pants in the doorway of a café as a man twice his size and pointing at him runs toward a table.
This is pure NASCAR! Everyone can sense there is about to be a pile up.
Then, fate, karma, the Universe, whatever intervenes in a bit of poetic justice.
He trips!
Don’t worry. The guy is fine. He is a smoker so it wasn’t like he was moving very fast to begin with anyway.
Me and a few other strangers go to his side. A guy oblivious to any of the drama that happened a minuet ago offers his hand to the man.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” The man yells.
The potential Good Samaritan first looks hurt then pissed.
“God damn homeless shit!” He says.
You have love that too. In San Francisco, you can be black, gay, transgender or whatever. But the two worse things you can call someone is homeless or meter maid.
As our disgruntled conservative gets back to his feet and sees his phone sitting on the table, he yells out at the complete stranger who attempted to come to his aid. “Faggot!”
Well, you can’t yell that in front of a café in San Francisco and expect no reaction.
Unless you are one.
I can’t be sure, but I think that’s how the gay pride parade starts.
Now, everyone freaks and this stranger to our city realizes what he has just done.
A woman, a lesbian holding a recyclable Whole Foods shopping bag, turns to him and asks, “What did you just say?”
His eyes go wide.
She puts the grocery bag down, puts her hands on her hips and repeats herself. “What did you just say?”
Oh this is far better than anything I could of wished on him.
He starts to stutter. The guy he originally yelled at, the kid in the doorway and a few other café patrons are all looking at him. Meanwhile, the phone still sits on the table by an empty coffee cup and I am smiling like a man about to enjoy an ass hole getting a beat down from a lesbian.
That’s when his phone rings.
Want to guess what his ring tone is?
The mission impossible theme! Seriously. The mission impossible theme!
Oh the Universe has a sense of humor indeed. I tip my hat to you, sir!
I laugh and so do a few of the other people.
“That’s my phone.” He manages to say.
The lesbian picks it up and throws it into the middle of the street. All that softball has really paid off too, because it is out there in the middle of traffic going the other way.
She just smiles that smile of, what are you going to do big man? Besides, there are about 5 or 6 people surrounding him now. What is he going to do?
He just turns and leaves as the small crowd that has gathered breaks into spontaneous applause.
God I love this city!

Let's Just Sue What We Don't Like!

Are you sitting down? You might want to get some smelling salts ready too.
The creator of the weather channel, friend to shut-in’s and the elderly, is thinking about suing Al Gore.
Why?
Not only does he think Global warming is a fraud, but he also sees no reason for people to cut back on their energy consumption.
I’m surprised the Bush administration doesn’t want to sue the Discovery Channel because they think evolution is a fraud.
This could start a bad wave of lawsuits.
Neo-Nazis could sue the History Channel for Documentaries on the Jewish extermination because they think the Holocaust didn’t happen.
Can I sue CNN for the election results if I don’t like them?
Dude, this is retarded!
Go Google Island nations disappearing, or Artic Ice cores demonstrating levels of pollution going through the roof at the start of the Industrial revolution.
Holy Shit, man!
Even if you believe that our warming planet is going through some normal cycle, blasting tons of toxic shit into the air we breath can’t be a good idea. Cutting back on fossil fuel use would be welcomed by anyone with asthma. Oh, and NO scientist thinks this is normal. Sure, you hear names and impressive sounding institutes in the news every once in a while that says the proof isn’t all in yet. When you dig a little into them though, they all turn out to get their funding from oil companies.
When 90% of all the energy created on this planet comes from fossil fuels, it’s not a conspiracy to say that the 5 largest oil & coal companies have a vested interested in telling us they have nothing to do with climate change.
Do you know what happens when you go to the beach in San Francisco these days?
You get a tan.
That’s just not normal.
I’m surprised the Weather Channel isn’t being sued by sleeping pill manufactures. It has to be one of the most boring things on TV.
There use to a local TV station that would broadcast nothing else on Christmas day but 12 hours of a log burning in a fire place.
No lie.
People would turn it on and drink eggnog around it. Isn’t the Weather Channel really just the equivalent of that?
My Dad sits in a plastic lawn chair two inches from the TV inside the house and goes back and forth between the Weather Channel and Fox news. He might throw in the occasional Law & Order episode, but not if it has, “The black guy” in it. When you talk to him, you have to remember that those are the only two sources of information he trusts. It will make any conversation with him make more sense once you know this.
“Dad, you and Mom thinking of moving again?”
“You see how gays want to be married like regular people? My God! It’s 23 degrees in North Dakota. The surge hasn’t gotten enough credit in the liberal media for working. They expect snow in Missouri this week. Who would vote for a guy named, what is it? Barak? Lots of flooding on the east coast…”
“It’s Barrack, Dad.”
“What?”
"It’s Barrack Obama.”
“Mexicans are coming into this country like an invasion. Texas hasn’t had rain in nearly two months.”
“Do you blame the Mex-i-Can’s, for that too, Dad?”
And so it goes at the Klocek Homestead.

You know who else is being sued for 23 Million dollars in a class action lawsuit?
The makers of Airborne.
Turns out, it doesn’t work!
Yup. The Center for disease control thought the claims were exaggerated and started doing tests. Sure, there is placebo effect, but the fact is, it doesn’t do what it claims to do.
I am going to sue the CDC because I think it does. After all, a schoolteacher made it. What better proof do you want? Made by a schoolteacher? That’s how you want to market it? Just because you’re around colds all day doesn’t make you an expert in fighting them. Just like owning the weather channel doesn’t make you an expert at weather.
I bet the guy probably believes he owns the weather.
It always amazes me when rich people are so ignorant. They have the benefit of education and wealth and still remain stupid. Whenever I hear about racism, the going to the rallies type of racism; it’s usually some back wood’s red neck that didn’t get education.
That’s just ignorance.
But to have money and education and still be a racist, that’s real hatred.
You can always spot them at the Klan rallies.
They’re the ones wearing sheets with a 300-thread count.

I don’t know if the guy has watched his own channel, but things have changed.
The people who say, it is a demonstration of mans arrogance to think he can have any effect on the planet are nuts! It is always the same people who want to quote you the Bible too. Something about God giving man dominion over the land an animals. If that's true, we really have done a shitty job then.
There are entire rivers made poisonous by industrial waste that we can't drink from.
The EPA created something named, the superfund just to clean up land contaminated by business.
An enormous island of trash twice the size of Texas is floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been growing since the 1950s. The make up of the trash is 80 percent plastic and weighs more than 3.5 million tons.
Apparently, we are having an impact on the planet ! It has to start adding up eventually. If Jesus comes back soon the first thing out of his mouth will be a cough.
The same people who are against stem cell research because all life is precious, are the same ones who see three legged toads by a power plant and go, "that happens."
Yeah. Shit happens. Like when you spend the last 50 years of civilization pumping the atmosphere full of toxins and expect God to just take care of it. Maybe the reason he doesn't talk anymore is because he just can't see us threw all that shit.
That would explain a lot.

All jokes are not created equal.

A long time ago on a road gig somewhere in Washington State, I was standing in the bathroom after a show when one of the audience members struck up a conversation with me about comedy. As we stood at the sink, more people from the show filed in. At some point, another man listening to our conversation said, “Don’t you think you are taking comedy too seriously?”
I had to swallow the impulse to yell at him. Instead, I asked him, “Do you take your job seriously?”
“I’m unemployed.” He said and left the bathroom.
It is true that you can take your job too seriously. We have all seen the fellow employee that freaks out about everything broadcasting tension in to the general workspace.
But comedy, like anything you do for the money and the love, is a job. You have to take it seriously and sometimes that blows.
I can vividly remember driving to gigs when I did it full time with no other thought in my head than, this gig is for the cell phone bill. Or, this gig is the PG & E bill.
It really sucks the joy out of it.

I have written many times of showing up to gigs I would rather not be at, but because I needed the money I did them. After awhile, you realize how many of these gigs you are doing. You start to see the impact on whatever artistic integrity you thought you had. Playing to drunks who are mad at you because they can’t play Fooz Ball during the show is not exactly the crowd you feel comfortable taking on challenging subject matter.

In a bar in Great Falls, Montana once, I had the experience a lot of us have had. Two guys came up to me at the bar and said they didn’t like what I said about religion.
I don’t remember the joke. It was early in my career so I have no doubt that it was an imperfect attempt at going in the direction I craved.
Bill Hicks, comedy legend and all around idol to any stand-up wishing to expand the definition of comedy, has a classic story about such a situation. After a show, two men approached him in the parking lot.
“We didn’t like what you said about religion.”
He paused, took a breath and asked, “Are you Christians?”
They spit the answer out with naked aggression. “Yes!”
Calmly, right before he walked away he said, “Then forgive me .”

These guys ended up buying me way too many shots of something that night. It ended well. But I remember how upset they were in the beginning. Not at what I had said, but that I had even brought religion up in a comedy show.
This goes to the heart of several issues that fascinate me.
The idea that anything is above being poked fun at is ridiculous. It’s also contrary to what America is supposed to be all about.
I don’t think they had Stand-Up Comedy in mind when they added the first amendment, but I honestly can’t think of a better use of free speech than a talented comic using humor to point out the inconsistencies a lot of people don’t want to see in their "truth". Not just in faith, but on any topic.
Anyone with confidence and dick jokes can make an audience laugh. That’s no secret at all. Hell, the best-written joke will always be blown out of the water with a fart.
What I’m getting at is the, comedy is subjective idea.
Of course it is. I know intelligent, highly skilled people who work as leaders in their industry that love the three stooges. I also know out of work friends who read Noam Chomsky and think Lenny Bruce wasn’t hard enough on society. I personally have a friend and comic that thinks Larry the Cable Guy is amazing! But the plain truth is, not all punch lines are created equal.

Sure a fart is funny, or a song parody or a done to death premise on dogs and cats. But a joke that gets a big laugh on religion or politics is just superior.
It has to be.
In a business flooded by the Larry the Cable Guy-Dane Cook mentality, a joke on tough subject matter that destroys is just better for a hundred obvious reasons.
Judging anything so subjective as comedy is almost an oxymoron. But to say that a guy playing song parodies is in the same category as a guy making you laugh at beliefs you might hold dear is not fair.
But then again, maybe I take this too seriously.
Here are three facts I know are true about comedy:

1.The audience is never wrong.

2.They only laugh at what is funny.

3.People who are in a position of judging should know comedy and know what has been done and what is more difficult to pull off.

I remember doing a few different competitions in my time. I remember losing out to a guy who wouldn’t argue that he was basically doing dating material. That’s not to say that he wasn’t funny or that he didn’t performed it beautifully, but jokes about 9/11 that shed light in places the country was not yet willing to completely look at yet, cannot be judged the same way. Especially if they are both getting laughs.
Did each comic get big laughs?
Yes.
Did the comics push the envelope successfully?
Well, in my not so humble opinion one of us did and one of us didn’t.

If we are going to make comics compete against each other, then let’s put things in proper perspective. Lets be honest about what is artistic and what is pure entertainment.
I would add one more rule to what I know is the truth in Stand-Up.

4.All jokes are not created equal.

It seems funny to me that I will cite the first amendment, yet I write the sentence, not all things are created equal. It's not something we like to hear, the truth, but comics know it. If they don't, they should. Of course the crowd is going to laugh at dick jokes. They always have! I'm not the first guy do strive for something more out of making people laugh, nor am I the best-but I try. It is so easy to go for the easy laugh or the shock value outrageous laugh. To put something out there in front of a crowd that is part philosophy and part punch line, is a little more difficult.

The Bit, I am probably best known for is the pigeon homeless guy one. It's a good bit. It's clean, funny and gets laughs. But the bits I am most proud of are the ones about religion. I think they are personal to my experience yet universal in there logic too. I think that's a great indicator of a quality joke; will people who do not share the same opinion laugh at it? In the final analysis, if it is a well written well performed joke, they will. They have to. It is constructed so well that there is no other response. Jokes are like little mathematical proofs. 1+1 will always equal 2.
That is probably the mathematical equivalent of a dick joke, 1+1. The algebra of comedy is talking about politics, religion and sex without being dirty. That's the real trick.

So if you ever find yourself in the delicate position of judging comedy, remember that anything about dating, or the phrase, being married is weird, is a red flag that screams EASY! But a joke on something you are not use to hearing about, a joke that gets just as big a laugh as, whats up with black guys doing it one way and white guys doing it another, is simply superior. Think of it like this, those jokes have to work twice as hard as those other jokes.
That's why I am all Animal Farm on this issue; not all jokes are equal.

Fix the System

The former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay said he will now be a defence witness for the driver of Osama bin Laden.
This is a career Air Force Colonel people!
Why would he do such a thing?
Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, resigned in October after being placed under the command of torture advocate William J. Haynes. The idea that America would advocate for human rights all around the world while torturing people is bad enough, but the new chief prosecutor has also rigged the system of military tribunals at Guantanamo.
Hey, don't take my word for it. This is a portion of a conversation between the two men reported in the Nation Magazine and ignored by the media.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions."

The guy in charge of prosecuting the people is admitting that the system is fixed.

That is pretty amazing!
You understand what he is saying? Right?
Since we held them without charge and illegally in the eyes of most justice systems around the world, releasing them would be admitting the mistake. Instead of admitting we made a mistake, were going to have fake trials where the men held in cages for the last five years will be executed.
And we have made mistakes.
There is a new book out named, Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.
Murat Kurnaz, was a 19 year old resident of Germany and citizen of Turkey. Pakistan's security forces, looking for people to sell to American intelligence officers for the $3,000 bounty, picked him up shortly after he was married in Pakistan. German intelligence sources and the CIA knew he was innocent in September 2002. However, even after the German foreign minister spoke to Bush on his behalf, he was held until 2007.
Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding and indefinite detention is what Murant, and all the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have had to deal with.
His is just one example.
Australia, England and Yemen have also had citizens released to them from our prison on Cuban soil.
Anyone else see the grand irony of criticizing Cuban for human rights violations while we keep people in cages on the same island?
Look, I'm not saying everyone there is innocent, but terrorist or not, we cannot continue to run around the world and tell people from the business end of a gun that we our about Liberty and justice if were going to do something that would be familiar to Joseph Stalin.
We are suppose to be better than that.
Right?
Ah hell. Lets argue about flag pins some more.

The Lesson We Forgot

Alright class.
Anyone know who President Eisenhower was?
Just for the hell of it, read these speeches and quotes. I know, it's a lot of stuff to read but as you read it remind yourself of a few facts no one debates.

1. He Was the Architect for D-day, the largest combat operation in history that begun the taking back of Europe from the Nazis.

2. He was a Republican.

3. The Military-industrial complex, was his quote given as a warning in his farewell speech to the American people at the end of his Presidency.

4. Think about the stuttering agenda driven speeches filled with fear and hate mongering that have played to the worst of our instincts rather than a true and sincere belief in the wisdom of the American citizen over these last 8 years.

5. A lot of what he warned us about has come to pass.

6. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

I would go a step farther and also say, a people who ignore their nations history will fall for arrogance masquerading as leadership, ignorance disguised as truth, aggression wrapped in the flag, and patriotic fever used as a cheap propaganda weapon against our own best interests.
When we live in a country that thinks, the surge is just a new energy drink, we are ALL in trouble.

Parts of Eisenhower's farewell speech.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Selected quotes.

The substance of peace is a universal appreciation of human values.”
Speech at Belfast University, August 24, 1945

“We must strive for understanding and be ready to do our part in substituting cooperation for conflict.”
Speech for Freedom House, November 7, 1945

“I know of no more sincere pacifists than American soldiers and veterans.”
Speech to the American Legion, November 20, 1945

“To be strong nationally is not a sin, it is a necessity.”
Speech at American Legion Convention, Chicago, IL, November 20, 1945

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Speech at Canada Club, Ottawa, Canada, January 10, 1946

“All must learn that in cooperation there is giving as well as receiving.”
Speech at Canada Club, Ottawa, Canada, January 10, 1946

“Until the peoples of the world understand and respect the interests of their neighbors, the victory will elude us.”
Speech at Canada Club, Ottawa, Canada, January 10, 1946

“I wish we could have an all-volunteer Army.”
Address Over CBS & Associated Broadcast Networks, January 18, 1946

“To remain at peace we must be a strong nation.”
Speech in Connection with Cancer Drive, Washington, DC, April 1, 1946

“In the scientific world the best of yesterday is the obsolete of today.”
Army Day Speech, Chicago, April 6, 1946

“It is the job of the men of the Armed Forces to see that the enemies of humanity cannot again make war.”
Army Day Speech, Los Angeles, April 6, 1946

“Small nations have as much right as large ones to feel secure.”
Remarks at Dinner of Cleveland Aviation Club, April 11, 1946

“The education of the officer never ends.”
Speech for Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College ROTC, April 21, 1946

“We must do all that we can toward progressive disarmament, for which I think we should all pray very sincerely.”
Remarks at General Commission on Army & Navy Chaplains, Washington, DC, April 24, 1946

“The security establishment of our democracy must always remain representative of our way of life.”
American Newspaper Publishers Association, New York City, April 25, 1946

“All must understand that military rank is a recognition of responsibility and not a ration book of personal privilege.”
American Newspaper Publishers Association, New York City, April 25, 1946

“From the time of Washington, American soldiers fighting and dying for this republic have had their inspiration in its championship of liberty.”
Georgia Bar Convention, Savannah, Georgia, May 24, 1946

“The Army of the United States was truly the people of the United States in action.”
Address to Reserve Officers' Association, Chicago, Illinois, June 2, 1946

“The wartime Army of the United States was a mass expression of America.”
>Address to Reserve Officers' Association, Chicago, Illinois, June 2, 1946

“On our future conduct depends the peace of the world for generations to come.”
Address to Reserve Officers' Association, Chicago, Illinois, June 2, 1946

“Soldiers apply an acid test to their officers that only the true leader can survive.”
>Address to Reserve Officers' Association, Chicago, Illinois, June 2, 1946

“War is not only destructive, it is sterile of positive result.”
Address to Reserve Officers' Association, Chicago, Illinois, June 2, 1946

“Our ideal today is a free, prosperous and cooperative world.”
Address to Army Ordnance Association, Detroit, Michigan, June 3, 1946

“The American tradition is to finish whatever we start, however hard the road.”
Material for NBC Address, June 4, 1946

“The freedom of the individual and his willingness to follow real leadership are at the core of America’s strength.”
Address at Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, June 9, 1946

“The purpose of the United Nations is peace.”
Address at Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, June 9, 1946

“Every nation is neighbor to all mankind.”
American Alumni Association, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 11, 1946

“Democracy is essentially a political system that recognizes the equality of humans before the law.”
Address to Constituent Assembly, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 8, 1946

“There is no strength equal to the strength of an enduring friendship.”
Address to Constituent Assembly, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 8, 1946

“The barriers to neighborliness are fear and prejudice spawned by ignorance.”
Address at Veterans Day, Nebraska State Fair, Lincoln, Nebraska, September 1, 1946

“There is no short cut or easy way to lasting peace.”
Address at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1946
>
“The proudest human that walks the earth is a free American citizen.”
Talk at the Commercial Club of Chicago, May 21, 1948

“To blend, without coercion, the individual good and the common good is the essence of citizenship in a free country.”
Columbia University Inaugural Address, October 12, 1948

“The free individual has been justified as his own master; the state as his servant.”
Commencement Address, Columbia University, June 1, 1949

“There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure.”
Commencement Address, Columbia University, June 8, 1949

“Misunderstanding among neighbors is perilous in the atomic age.”
Lecture at Columbia University, March 23, 1950

“Far better to risk a war of possible annihilation than grasp a peace which would be the certain extinction of free man’s ideas and ideals.”
Lecture at Columbia University, March 23, 1950

“The gamble of war lures the desperate, for even overwhelming defeat can hardly worsen their state.”
Lecture at Columbia University, March 23, 1950ont style="font-weight: bold;">

“To prevent the crime of war, all nations and all ideologies can unite without sacrifice of principle.’
Lecture at Columbia University, March 23, 1950

“We reject any insinuation that one race or another, one people or another, is in any sense inferior or expendable.”
Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

“We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”
Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”
Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

“To be true to one’s own freedom is, in essence, to honor and respect the freedom of all others.”
State of the Union Address, February2, 1953

“We must be devoted with all our hearts to the values we defend.”
State of the Union Address, February2, 1953

“As our heart summons our strength, our wisdom must direct it.”
State of the Union Address, February2, 1953

“The seeds of hate and of distrust can be born on winds that heed no frontier or shore.”
Address to the Organization of American States, April 12, 1953

“No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.”
Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

“Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.”
Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

“We live in an age of peril.”
Radio Address to the American People, May 9, 1953

“The plain truth is that security is planned, not blindly bought.”
Radio Address to the American People, May 9, 1953

A speech given in 1953 to the news paper editors of America.

The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

In the light of these principles the citizens of the United States defined the way they proposed to follow, through the aftermath of war, toward true peace.

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road?

The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.

The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point to the hope that comes with this spring of 1953.

Me again class. Remember, he was a man who was in war and knew it's corrosive effect on the human soul and he was a Republican that advocated peace and understanding as the bravest way forward for any Nation.