That Pesky Constitution

Word to my Scumbag Fuckhead Republican neighbors....

The Scumbag Fuckhead Republican is a different branch from the regular sort of Republican....you remember: Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower....all those guys.

There was a time when Republicans stood for the rule of law, individual responsibility and all those kind of corny, old-fashioned values.....many of which were written down way back in the 18th century and encoded in a thing called The Constitution of The United States.

The old boys did not get it exactly right the first time around, so they made some adjustments.....they called them amendments. I call them the Fuck-Ups.

The First Fuck-Up of the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In the past two hundred and twenty some odd years many, many of our people have died in defense of the various aspects of The First Fuck-up.

The Free Speech part especially.

We have gone to war with folks whose first order of business was knocking down Freedom of Speech.

Nazis.

Communists.

Gangsters.

Facists.

Right-wing lunatics.

Criminals.

One of the many beauties of our country is that we allow wide open public discourse about all subjects....kind, simple, happy, crazy, viscious, insane, intelligent, weird....whatever. We take it all in, process it.....and come up with something that we call America.

When I put an "Obama/Biden" sign in the access right-of-way of my property, I am expressing my Constitutional rights as enumerated in the First Fuck-up.

As it turns out.....I am not a fan of Obama. I fear that he is a weasly fuckhead only a short breeze short of the ultimate Democratic whore, Diane Feinstein.

But....he has not lied to me yet. He does not cheat on his wife. And he has earned everything he has gained in his life.

Unlike, John McCain......he doesn't think that just because he is on third base, he hit a triple.

My Obama/Biden sign is really a "Lord save us from another eight years of lying, theiving, cocksucking, drunken, whoring fuckheads like John McCain" sign.

Just because you were an early investor in Apple, and I am a silly, working-class groveler does not give you the right to take away my sign from my property.....just because it offends your sensibilities.

There was a time when Republicans were the defenders of the Constitution and free speech and freedom of religion and all that.

Tonight I actually got invited to a party as a guest. A sweet, kind client....who was surprised by her husband with the event....and took time out to speak kindly to me and smooth over the obvious weirdness of the worker hanging out with the white folks without his white uniform....

I did have some nice conversations with the guests.....

The most memorable was one with a fan of the blog....poor soul.

We chatted for a bit about politics, and fun and games.....and he turned serious for a second.

"I think the most serious problem facing America right now is the reform of the Republican Party....."

Bingo.

Competition used to be cool. The fight and struggle made us all stronger....we did not actually try to destroy each other in any manner necessary.

Republicans used to value the Constitution....and be against big government. Still, the government they were for was actually competent. They were against crazy spending....not in favor of lining their friends pockets at public expense. Public expense used to be a dirty word.

But, still......the entire American ethic was all about discourse. I say this, you say that. We go away and think about it.....and we both wind up at this-and-that.

Rich Republicans are not supposed to be sending their illegal immigrant Mexican gardeners to steal the Obama signs from their neighbors in Carmel Valley.

Really.

The airwaves have been full of an old 60's radical, Bill Ayers....who Obama supposedly knows or knew.

Ayers was what the real guys knew as a coffee table pussy hound. Politics as a way of getting laid. You definitely would not want him packing your 'chute, loading your clips, or remembering where the blue wire was supposed to go.....

Like John McCain, come to think of it.....

I hark back to actual 60's radicals from Chicago. I drew a major life lesson from one of The Chicago Seven: Abbie Hoffman.

In his anthem diatribe "Steal This Book", Mr. Hoffman has at least one nugget in the dross:

"What you own is only what you can defend."

Think about that Mr. Sign Stealing Early Apple Investor Neighbor Man.

The increasingly bitter.....non-American...tone to our political discourse is actually scaring me.

Kill Obama! Traitor! Terrorist!

Us soccer people know that competition is good....it makes you stronger. Differences and diversity are good......

Here is a repeat for long-time blog people.....I apologize to them.

In 1972 I found myself in the odd situation of having to hitch-hike between branches of Chase Manhattan in Europe...trying to track down funds supposedly sent to me by a former Hitler Youth boss of mine named Karl Demler.

I picked Chase Manhattan because I was a Hemingway fan.....and my dad was a banker. Chase owned the house across the street from us in Chatham, New Jersey....and they would rotate through various European execs. One of them was an awesome Austrian named Herr Judar. Herr Judar had a box at the Staats Oper in Vienna and should have been a diplomat, not a banker. Smooth, kind, erudite, capable, devious.....

Herr Judar was also a literary nut, and turned me on to the fact that Chase Manhattan handled all the financial and literary affairs of the ex-pat Americans between the wars......and ever since: Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Alice B. Toklas, Henry Miller, George Plimpton, etc.

Hemingway used Chase as a post office. All his mail was sent to Chase, and he would collect both his money and his mail at Chase in Paris in their office behind the Opera. The poor shlubs in the Paris office would forward around his mail and money to the various Chase branches and keep old Ernie afloat while he was transforming modern literature.

I immediately opened a Chase bank account......even though I was a home-bound junior in high school in New Jersey.

When I moved to Europe, I assumed that Chase would be there for me just as they were for Hemingway.....and I was right. They collected my mail, and my pathetic few shekels, and organized and collated them for me....and made them available to me wherever I found myself.

Just like your account at WaMu, right?

At one point, due to the deviousness of the Hitler Youth.....I found myself trying to track down my money from Chase branch to Chase branch. Paris. Zurich. Munich. Vienna. Trieste. Athens.

I had to hitchhike between the branches......and rapidly my small funds became no funds. The pot at the end of the Hitler Youth rainbow was Athens, and I was in Trieste....so I set out.

I had to work my way south.

I got a job with the Dubrovnik City Orchaestra as a roadie by virtue of being stranded with them in a downpour in Split, Croatia waiting for a ferry.

I would ride on the bus, and pack and unpack all the instruments and baggage and crap, and help set up....and they fed me and kept me warm and relatively dry and moved me relatively south towards Athens.

Split, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Budva, Titograd.

I am one of the few folks on the planet who can put Kosovo on his CV. Pec. A town that means five.....my only word in Serbian. I always got five of whatever I pointed at in the bakery...and it always cost....pec.

The thing about the Dubrovnik City Orchaestra was that it was totally eclectic and diverse. We had Jews, we had Slovenians, we had Croats, and Serbs, and Fucking Commies, and Bosnian Muslims....and at least one Irish Catholic from New Jersey.

And they made gorgeous, inspired music. The fights on the bus were all about composers and musicians I had never heard about. One night the bus broke and we all spent the night in a train station in Skopje drinking slivovitz with Russian soldiers, sleeping on piles of military equipment, staying out of the rain....

This was during Tito.....it was Jugoslavia, and it was Communist.

The only difference between the Jews, the Catholic Croats, the Orthodox Serbs, the Muslim Bosnians, and the random Commies was that the Jews relished pork sausage, and and never went to Temple, the Commies told horrid Tito jokes, the Croats ate meat on Friday and never went to Mass on Sundays, and the Serbs went along with all of it with a laugh and another shot of slivovitz.

The conversation was constant, though......We argued, we fought, we laughed.....there were some fights, but mostly over booze or women....or men. It was an artistic and creative environment that took the best of humankind and raised it up to a new level.

Ten years later, 99% of my friends were dead.....killed by ethnic cleansing and violence. Croat killed Serb, who both killed Bosnian Muslim....and they all killed the Jews and the Commies.

It is hard for Americans to understand. In 1972 our differences in Jugoslavia were like that of Golden Retriever people vs. Jack Russell people.....or Carmel High vs PG High......or Liverpool vs. Manchester United......

Murder was not part of the program. Mozart was.

Hatred, intolerance, and lack of respect for freedom of speech is the canary in the coal mine of free society.

I bought a lot of Obama signs.......

One is going back on the corner of my property tomorrow.....

Take that Apple-Investor Man.........

I mean that in a very loving way.......