Billy Bad Ass

I don’t usually take the advice of rightwingers.  But I did this time.  After receiving inflamed email messages from dozens of angry rightists that I should get the hell out of the USA and go to Venezuela, I accepted their challenge and flew to Caracas. 

“Would you like me to start a fund to ship your ass down there, Comrade Cohen?”

What had provoked the often-abusive emailers was my 2005 Internet column urging U.S. residents to buy their gasoline at Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company.  I called for a Citgo BUY-cott, to protest Bush’s interventionist foreign policy while supporting innovative anti-poverty programs in Venezuela.  http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm  (Last winter, Citgo started a program that provided discounted home-heating oil to low-income families in the U.S.)

“Hey moron, if you hate America so much and love Venezuela, why don’t you go there?”

I’m glad I listened to the conservative chorus.  In late June, I headed to Venezuela with a fact-finding delegation sponsored by the respected U.S. human rights group, Witness for Peace.  The grueling trip covered much ground and all sides of Venezuela’s social/political landscape.  It is a complex country, headed by sometimes volatile President Hugo Chavez, a leftist and harsh Bush critic who was first elected in 1998. 

As soon as I returned home, I headed to the nearest Citgo to fill up my tank — more committed than ever to send a few dollars toward Venezuela’s poor.    

“You, sir, are as un-American as they come.”

For decades, Venezuela’s vast oil wealth had been squandered and hoarded by its light-skinned elite, while most Venezuelans — largely of indigenous, African and mixed descent — lived in dire poverty.  Today, oil revenue from Citgo and elsewhere is funneled into social programs (called “missions”) to benefit the country’s poor majority.  They’re reminiscent of FDR’s New Deal programs. . .born of our economic bust.  But Venezuela’s missions are fueled by a boom — a boom in oil prices that is likely to persist for years.   

“Because of Chavez, communism is thriving in South America.”

From what I could see, capitalism is thriving.  Foreign oil interests continue to profit handsomely from Venezuelan petrol, but they now pay a fairer share of taxes and royalties.  So do the 80 McDonald’s restaurants in Venezuela, which were briefly shut down last year over alleged tax cheating.   

Multinational companies and the old elite are doing fine in today’s Venezuela.  So well that some Venezuelan leftists denounce Chavez — despite his talk of building “21st century socialism” — as a tool of corporate imperialism. 

Like other oil-exporting countries, Venezuela in the past allowed its domestic productive economy to atrophy.  Besides oil, it produced little — with food largely imported.  Today, people in poor areas are organizing themselves into productive and agricultural co-ops, supported by low-interest government loans.  We visited a federal bank that underwrites women-run businesses nationwide. 

My guess is that if Chavez succeeds in Venezuela — a big “if” in a country of endemic corruption, poverty and crime, in the backyard of the U.S. superpower — its economic system will end up looking more like Sweden than Cuba.

What’s not debatable is that the poor have found hope in the Chavez administration — which is why he’s perhaps the most popular president in our hemisphere.  So popular that Chavez critics in the U.S. government and Venezuelan opposition concede that they won’t be able to defeat him in December when he seeks reelection. 

“The trouble with all you liberals is that you’re anti-American and hate democracy.”

Participation in democracy is booming in Venezuela under Chavez. That’s partly due to polarization, but also because so many poor people feel empowered enough for the first time to get active in politics.  A massive 2005 Latinobarometro poll conducted in 18 Latin American countries showed that Venezuelans are among the top in preference for democracy over all other forms of government, in satisfaction with how their democracy is functioning, and in belief that their country is “totally democratic.”

“The oil money never gets to the poor. . . . You must have been paid by Chavez to write what you wrote.”

Across Venezuela, it’s hard to miss the new investment in public education.  Schools are being upgraded in urban and rural areas and are required to offer free breakfasts and lunches, arts, music and after-school activities. Unlike the U.S., these are well-funded mandates.  Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, according to UNESCO, thanks to adult education that has penetrated the poorest neighborhoods.   

In poor communities, federally-subsidized stores called “mercals” sell food at half the market price.  In the capital of Caracas, thousands of government-funded soup kitchens offer free lunches every weekday to the indigent; our delegation was headquartered in a church that served 150 free lunches per day.  Across the country, new housing is being built to replace shantytown “ranchos” that so many Venezuelans live in.  

Thousands of free (”Barrio Adentro”) medical clinics have been built inside neighborhoods that never had doctors before — so many clinics that you can spot them from the highway. These are staffed largely by doctors from Cuba; in return, Cuba receives Venezuelan oil. When we asked a community leader how local residents reacted to the Cuban doctors, he explained that most Venezuelan doctors won’t serve in poor barrios: “People in our community don’t care whether the doctors are French, German, Canadian, Mexican or Cuban — as long as they’re here to help.” 

“Go to Venezuela and kiss up to the anti-American dictator.”

If Venezuela is a dictatorship, it must be the first in world history in which the opposition controls most of the media.  And the first in which demonstrations occur regularly outside the presidential palace (organized by various groups, especially low-income activists complaining about broken promises and government inefficiency). 

Dissent is alive and well in Venezuela.  Any casual viewer can see anti-Chavez criticism all over TV, the country’s dominant medium and largely in the hands of conservative business interests.  The opposition used its power on TV to support a short-lived military coup in 2002 (strike 1), an employers’ oil lockout in 2002-3 (strike 2) and a failed recall election in 2004 (strike 3). Chavez won nearly 60% in the recall vote — which was monitored closely by international observers.  

Efforts to bring down Chavez — through democratic and undemocratic means — have been supported by the Bush administration.  Which makes it ironic that the American Family Association, a U.S. religious ultra-right group, has organized a Citgo boycott on the basis of its Internet hoax: “Venezuela Dictator Vows to Bring Down U.S. Government.”  The headline tends to reverse reality; Chavez has made no such vow.  But AFA true believers have bombarded my email inbox for months with the hoax.

“Try Jesus. If you don’t like Him, the devil will always take you back.. . . .What terrorist group are you affiliated with?”

If you think the U.S. is politically polarized, you haven’t been to Venezuela.  Clinton’s impeachment by the religious right over sex is child’s play compared to what’s gone on in Venezuela, where Chavez has survived near-death experiences at the hands of a conservative opposition that has never accepted his presidency.

Columnist Paul Krugman talks of a “New Class War” in our country.  In Venezuela, it’s old-fashioned class war.  Political and media confrontation between Chavez and the opposition is vicious, personal and bare-knuckled.  While independent human rights monitors in Venezuela complain about isolated cases of government intimidation of opposition figures and journalists, they scoff at claims that democracy is in jeopardy or that dictatorship is coming.

Today, Chavez is popular (his approval ratings dwarf Bush’s), rambunctious in whipping up his base against both domestic opponents and Bush, and prone to hyperbole in his hours of extemporaneous speaking each day.  He has waged a war of words against U.S. Empire and Bush, whom he calls “Mr. Danger.”  But that’s polite in light of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld having compared Chavez to Adolph Hitler. Or Rev. Pat Robertson having called for Chavez to be assassinated.

“You can write your articles about how great he [Chavez] is, but I know, as well as other true Americans, that he is not a good man and he does need to be taken out of power as soon as possible.”

To me, the issue is less about Chavez than about the social initiatives his government has unleashed.  When I first wrote about Venezuela 14 months ago, I urged a simple economic action: filling up at Citgo so that our money at the pump helps Venezuela’s poor instead of Middle East oiligarchs.  That remains a good idea.

Nowadays, I also urge political action: that we contact Congress to demand that the U.S. stay out of Venezuela’s political contest.  That’s up to Venezuelans to decide.  Not us.  The U.S. should stop its efforts to back the conservative opposition and cease all (”National Endowment for Democracy”) funding of Venezuelan groups. 

And finally, I want to join my rightwing critics in one recommendation: Go to Venezuela.  If you can arrange it, examine the social transformations for yourself.  Study Spanish there.  See the decades of poverty, neglect and corruption that led to the election of Hugo Chavez — and whether his government is improving things.  

There’s an added bonus for anyone who can get down there: gasoline at 18 cents per gallon.  Expect to hear Venezuelans complaining that the price is too high.

—

Jeff Cohen is a media critic and former TV pundit. His new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, can be pre-ordered at http://jeffcohen.org/.

I felt undue pressure owning this blog because I thought I had to be clever and write a goddamn treatise every time I log into this thing. But, then I came to the realization that no one reads this, and if even if someone does I can simply post something that I thought interesting to spur conversation, thought, and debate. So, here goes…

For the time being, I’m simply going to post a website with the introduction “This is a true American patriot…”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Debs

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans
and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced
warning
that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and
surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to
devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as
the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits
free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual
pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an
optimal
outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand
works
its wonders.

There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as
occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island
last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen
committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million
people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population, with not a
single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in
the
U.S. press.

On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already
clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost
in New Orleans. Many people had “refused” to evacuate, media reporters
explained, because they were just plain “stubborn.”

It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters
began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee
because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With
hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had
to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not
work so well for them.

Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with
fewer
numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had
jobs before Katrina’s lethal visit. That’s what most poor people do in
this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs,
sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because
they’re
lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while
burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

The free market played a role in other ways. Bush’s agenda is to cut
government services to the bone and make people rely on the private
sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from
the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent
reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system
of
pumping out water had to be shelved.

Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this
disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people
had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to
strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite
reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands.
Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of
things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise
outcomes that would benefit us all.

But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New
Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some
years
now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the
Gulf’ coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the
White House.

As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that
relief
to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It
was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that “private
charity can do the job.” And for the first few days that indeed seemed
to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into
action. Its message: “Don’t send food or blankets; send money.”
Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network—taking
a moment off from God’s work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the
Supreme Court—called for donations and announced “Operation Blessing”
which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment
of canned goods and bibles.

By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure
of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not
arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than
with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free
marketeers always want.

But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of
answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few
helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it
take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When
would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The
state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks?
the
shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?

Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the
$33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news
(September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that “the federal
government’s response has been a national disgrace.”

In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of
foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations.
Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for
the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by
the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the
Supreme
Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity
could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most
deflating
and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch
in the nose?

Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the
truth—that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the
decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most
extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that
George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of
Corporate America.

——-
Michael Parenti’s recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights)
and
The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in
paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press)
will be published in the fall. For more information visit:
www.michaelparenti.org.

Mrs. Krupnak’s backyard was filled with walnuts. There were three black walnut trees in the backyard between the house and the chicken coop. It was necessary to wear boots and keep a perfumed handkerchief over one’s nose to pass through this small plot to the coop and the 3-acre garden beyond, for the piles of walnuts produced by these fecund trees had grown ankle-high. The rotting walnuts at the bottom of the massive pile smelled like gallons of vomited orange juice. However, the fresh walnuts were delicacies. Mrs. Krupnak could simply roast a few nutmeats with brown sugar and produce the most sumptuous treat for her dear Jason, who flopped around his grandparent’s house in newly knitted stockings and sweaters, all courtesy of his grandmother.

His cheeks, in his earliest years, carried a hot pink flush; which, in addition to his flowing black eyelashes, gave him a distinctly effeminate look. The shoulder-length black curls that established their thickness before he came out of the womb did nothing but enhance that impression. Often, in his puerile years, his mother was complemented on her “daughter’s good looks” and greeted with platitudes deigned to befit the appearance of two young ladies at a church social, as if the subtle comparison to what most thought to be her daughter would remind her of her own still-blossoming youth. His grandmother loved his long hair and girlish traits. There was something so unassuming about this child, something so opposite to the rough-hewn characteristics of her husband and son that calmed her tragic premonitions of familial dissolution and destruction. It was only her own genes in which she trusted to carry on the modesty she so longed for in the world — a world dominated by the demands and unreservedly ignorant obstinacy of men’s ideologies. She had married Vladimir Krupnak because she naively thought him to be solid and principled. It was only after her bondage was resolute that she awoke to the truth. Then, it was only the prospect of America that could keep her from withdrawing into an acceptance of her own nihility.

…

When a boy is two years into discovering his most basic urges, there is nothing on his mind but the exploration of his sensuality. A pinkie finger in his asshole massaging his prostate (which he hasn’t the slightest clue even exists, furthering himself by only pure instinctual feeling), twisting and pinching his nipples, slow and gentle to violently fast strokes from every direction on his penis, cupping and patting his balls, stretching his scrotum, soap, moisturizers, petroleum jellies, raw meat, pizza dough… lock up your pets and children until this boy has found his sexual muse! And even then, beware. Jason was at this stage in his carnal development. It is at this precarious stage of life in which a boy questions himself, questions every dictum of decorum, questions the relationships he upholds and the new ones he starts. These questions always hinge on how sex fits into each particular equation.

…

Cancer cells can be extremely mobile little things, especially when given access to the multiple highways in the body that promote travel around such sensitive areas as the brain. Even if a person is lucky enough to have each of the billions of microscopic, individual cells that make up the brain functioning regularly, there can always be an expeditious cancer cell that travels up the spinal column into the cerebral cortex and insouciantly attaches itself to those normal, healthy brain cells. There, this perfidious little monster will multiply its hideous form by the thousands, forming a lump of cancerous cells that press against the otherwise healthy brain matter, crushing, killing, or suffocating those cells to extinction. The results can vary from nausea and vomiting to violent seizures. Headaches are par for the course. The tragedy, however, sets in when the deus ex machina of the allegory, the miracle of radiation, fails its intended course.

In Stage IV, Jason’s father had little other hope, if any at all, than intensive treatments of radiation to kill the glioblastoma multiforme that had grown just above his right temple. The doctors had performed surgery, but were only able to remove a small percentage of the growth to avoid killing the man or debilitating him completely. The plan, after this “debulking,” was to apply a series of radiation treatments, which did nothing but invoke necrosis—where part of the brain dies from the radiation exposure. The main problem with radiation treatment, and why it is used as a last resort, is that the doses, which are required to eliminate the tumor, are more than the healthy cells of the brain can tolerate. When the brain dies, so too does the man, and the family is left with the pathetic, shitting, pissing, crying remains of a middle-aged infant. The deleterious effects of the treatments and cancer practically reverse human development, so there’s no hope of the patient regaining his faculties as one may witness with victims of stroke. The inevitable path is one of a continual slipping away and disillusionment toward death.

This post will start a fictional piece called “Jason’s Faith” that I’ve been working on.

-b

Jason’s Faith

There was normally an adult somewhere near, someone to hold the gray sphincter plumb and wipe the freshly opened creases with antiseptic tissues. Jason would stand with slaver glossing a red lower lip limned with the pallor of his revulsion, waiting for his cue to perfunctorily douse the moist area with lilac-scented cornstarch.

…

His mother had a meeting at the church with Father Phillips, who Jason thought was a nice-enough man for a God-gusher. When the priest would visit, he tended not to council Jason with dead words, but used as many contemporary metaphors to illustrate his faith as he could muster without appearing completely ridiculous. Jason’s mother was comforted more by routine, and so the father obliged her with private sacraments every Wednesday since the prognosis became clear to even her. Thus, every Wednesday she would call for a Hospice nurse or Mrs. Mickens down the street or her sister to stop by and tend to her husband, and volunteer Jason’s assistance.

Today, the call had slipped her mind, and it being the day before Thanksgiving, the office didn’t call to double check. So, Jason came home on that abnormally sticky autumn day from football practice, greeted on the front stoop with a waxy kiss from his mother and a copy-faded sheet of attendant duties.

– I need you to look after your father today, honey… you know most of this list anyway… quiet all day… shouldn’t be a hassle… call you in an hour or two to check in… love you so much…

She pinched his clammy cheek and clicked the roof of her mouth twice with the puckered look of affection that hadn’t reached his eyes since the first diagnosis. He turned his back on the driveway and opened the front door to illuminate each hanging particle with a warm wash of the four o’clock pumpkin-sun. Jason dropped his duffle bag, helmet, and shoulder pads on the granite tiles of the foyer, stood there and counted sixty ticks that resonated through the longcase clock’s mahogany shell. He didn’t breathe for the entire sixty seconds.

…

They call the cancer “Mantle cell lymphoma.” Jason would expect it to be rare. His father would never find defeat by some common cancer. The problem with most lymphomas is that they don’t “blossom” (so to speak) until their sprawl is utterly complete, all foundations have settled, the infrastructure is replete with a transit system ready to metastasize the countryside where there are no lymph nodes, and create these great diasporas that run the T cells out of the other formerly proud institutions of the body.

…

The faucet poured furiously into the muddied basin as Jason wrung his hands under the stream chiseling off the grime of the practice field. He scrutinized the bumpy contours of his face still healing from its last outbreak of acne; small, flaking ovals of dead skin still clung to the wounds. Jason wiped the condensation from the mirror and inspected the progress of his theretofore-nonexistent pectorals—so nonexistent as to keep his nipples flush with the plane that extended from his chest to ribcage. He made a bodybuilding pose in which he pushed both of his small breasts toward one another to show the slightest man-cleavage, sucking in his abdomen to the point of pain, and jealously thought about the developed manliness of fifteen-year-old James Ashby, the junior varsity’s star halfback. He relaxed his pose and shifted his concentration to his brown nipples, tugging at each of the hairs that protruded from the areolas’ thick pores. As he tugged, the hairs extended their length to reveal color bands matching each of his parent’s natural colors. He twisted each hair around his forefinger and quickly spun a thin spool of Irish-red and Russian-black hair. He pulled each hair from its root with a light snip and threw the curled strands into the sink, lit a match, and ignited the hair which then fizzled into small black pools of ash, producing light blue and grey wisps of smoke that were pulled into Jason’s smiling nostrils.

…

I’m not exactly a badass, but my friend wanted me to call it that. So, here goes…

This will be random musings, writings, updates, and so on. If I don’t interest you, I don’t really care. Here’s the first entry:

I play rapper… specifically, white angry rapper. And as white angry rapper, I’m able to say things that I can’t say in regular conversation. I’m able to say things that otherwise may lead to my indefinite incarceration in an indefinite prison in an indefinite location. Take the following lyrics from a song titled “Get or Be Got” as an example:

Strapped up, elastic tape around plastic/
Drastic measures cause immeasurable panic/
Fuck the checkpoint, if they find it I’ll blow there/
If I duck the bastards, then the café? I’ll blow there/
John Brown present-day, press on with precedence/
Burn down the colony and take over the residence/

This is, in another context (like say… a NASCAR event), a call for all-out revolution and could be perceived as intent to overthrow this great country, or any country for that matter. In this age of terrorism, these are words that should be contained to an artistic medium such as music to guard against any interpretation that I may, in fact, have any intention of strapping myself with plastic explosives and walking into a café to kill innocent people because I’ve fantasized myself to be some type of martyr for freedom. This is not my intention at all. Rather, my intent within the context of the song’s narrative is to have the listener try to find some way to relate to the anger boiling within one who would find those means appropriate to forwarding one’s cause. This, I don’t support, nor do I support any type of violence unless that violence is an act of complete and utter defense. Those lines can blur, admittedly. But in my position as a white, male American, I’m not in any immediate danger or facing any overwhelming oppression whatsoever. Whether that is then a reason in itself that I should keep my mouth shut, you can decide. But, to let you know now, I care what you think as much as you care what I think, if you approach my thinking as I would yours—as analytically as I’m capable. Otherwise, I have no energy to waste on you and I would hope for the same from you vice versa. So, please don’t send me to GTMO. I’m just trying to make a point here, elusive as it may be.

Another thing I enjoy about my angry white rapper talents is that I can also say things in ways that wouldn’t keep an appropriate conversational pace. I’m able to apply all the fun little literary devices that one learns in school, like assonance. Here’s an example: “A-ctually, I’m ex-a-ctly what I h-a-ve to be, a d-a-stardly b-a-stard emcee who m-a-stered degr-ee-s of you h-a-lf a-ss emc-ee-s on a f-a-st tr-a-ck to ch-ee-se. What kind of f-a-ctory manuf-a-ctured your st-ee-ze?” Note the short “a” and long “e” sounds. Note how, in four/four time, each hits the same up and down beat repeatedly. That is one of the more enjoyable aspects of my angry white rapping–speaking percussively. For example, “hit-you-one-time-with-a-rhyme-that’s-in-cred-ib-le-paint-in-your-mind-a-de-sign-that’s-in-del-ible-some-say-the-prose-I-com-pose-are-in-eff-ab-le-lev-el-these-dev-ils-to-hell-it’s-in-ev-it-ab-le.” And, of course, one must be able to curse to speak percussively. An angry white rapper without “shit,” “fuck,” “cunt,” etc. is like a drummer without toms or cymbals. “How sick? So sick that you can suck my dick!” Now, Method Man and Redman are far from being white, but they are what could be seen as angry rappers, in a sense. My point here is that how would one be able to so succinctly describe how sick, indeed, a person is without giving such a poignant example as telling all listeners to place their collective mouths around one’s genitalia? Let’s explore… “How sick? So sick that you may throw up.” That’s just cliché and boring. Plus, there’s no rhyme. However, by indicating that you would have any willing listener place his/her mouth around your penis points out that you are, in fact, one sick person (“sick” both mentally and probably by way of STD).

Anyway, I could go on with how my angry white rapping skills build my “street cred,” get me laid, and have enabled me to hang out with real musicians who know what the hell they’re doing… but I digress. If you’d like to hear some angry white rapping over hella hot bizang-a-langin’ beats, please e-mail steve@eighttrackmind.net and he’ll turn you on to my latest project, “The Perps” (short for “the perpetrators”).

Peace~!

(ps- My next invention is a sarcastic font, in which everyone recognizes when one is being sarcastic in expression through typeface. In the meantime…)

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