The Torturer’s Apprentice

Posted on July 31, 2008

When my sister was five, I was able to convince her the TV remote could turn her off. I was twelve and reeking of adolescence. My sister would make a rookie mistake, a blanket endorsement of the cartoon machine my pre-pubescence was raging against. She would want to watch “Inspector Gadget.” This was troubling on any number of fronts. I was about to become a man and while I might not have known what the soundtrack of my rebellion would be, I was damned if it would be, “Go Gadget Go.” I trained my eyes on edgier fare. Programs such as “Charles in Charge” where passion, fidelity, envy and sloth were pondered in twenty-four minute increments. But then little sis would toddle in, dressed in her pink ballerina tutu, with her button nose and pixie hair and eyes blind with adoration.

“Go Gadget Go!” she’d say, and I’d somehow have to swallow the urge to stuff her headfirst into the toilet.

“I’m watching Charles in Charge,” I said.

I expected a moment of contemplation. She was after all a sentient being, a pinnacle of evolution. She wasn’t chasing cars down the interstate.

But little sis persisted undaunted. There was no forethought, no cause and effect, much the same as the ten or so times she’d leapt headfirst out of her crib, or the mass destruction of private property in the wildcat years that followed. Her reputation as a sort of sugarplum black widow had earned her the nom de guarre, Rebecca the Wrecker.

I had to be tough. It was for her own good. I raised the remote control like a laser, “You know,” I explained with a clean sense of purpose, “these TV remotes have a special button. One where I can turn you off.” The shift in her eyes was instantaneous and she stared at the chunky black remote as though it was a cold steel weapon.

“But you love me?” she said, like it was a question. Read more

Bear in Repose

Posted on July 30, 2008

Lazy Days, Truckee, CaliforniaPhoto by WJ

Have Shovel, Will Govern

Posted on July 28, 2008

I’d never heard of Toyako, Japan. I thought someone misspelled Tokyo by accident. But Toyako was the name of the place, a picturesque resort that Cheney had stripped off the map. All I could find online was a cartoon man pulling a rickshaw. This was where we sent President Bush as our envoy to the G-8 summit. He signed a pledge to halve carbon emissions by 2050, but otherwise he didn’t do much. What we really learned about him was this: The dude has serious skills with a shovel.

Study the photographic evidence. This is a man who takes pride in shoveling. The backdrop was a tree planting, a symbolic admiration of life. It’s always delightful to watch heads of state, dressed in their finely tailored suits, taking a breather from debating the impending collapse of the economy to plant a row of firs.

Current events haven’t left them with much. The G-8 has no Middle East members, so what else can they really do but smile and shovel sod for the cameras? At least the President likes shoveling, so all wasn’t lost. A photo search of “Bush with Shovel” returns ninety-two thousand photos. Many aren’t of Bush shoveling dirt, but shoveling seems to be a cornerstone of Bush’s photographic legacy. Here’s one of the President with a gold shovel. Here’s one of him shoveling with the Presidents of Canada and Mexico. Here’s Bush tearing up the North Lawn to replace a fallen elm. And here’s Bush in Toyako, a picture of Protestant work ethic—back straight, eyes to the ground, shovel held with strong, locked wrists. All the while, the young Russian President taps at the soil, and the French and German Prime Ministers look to be doing light gardening.

Bush doesn’t garden. Bush is a shoveler, a man who shovels when the cameras are off. He’s clearing brush, lost in sweet dreams.  He’s back in Crawford, home at the ranch. It’s late January and the men in suits have disappeared. The world is somebody else’s problem. “Laura, where’s my shovel?” he asks. Finally. Finally.

Washington Jones looks at politics from a different point of view.

Sharing: Matt Taibbi

Posted on July 23, 2008

To be perfectly honest, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee. His Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country, not because his ministry was so very large, but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism. Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the state of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity—i.e. end of times prophecies; the belief that Armageddon is coming and that with it, the true believers will be whisked up to heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth and generally suffer various tortures.

The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, busses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most end timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key showdown.

Practically speaking, this manifests itself in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies. Support that Israel has been happy to receive despite the fact that church doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle—with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown to them by American evangelicals if they knew for instance that ardent end timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the second coming. Read more

“Kiss another day goodbye”

Posted on July 21, 2008

Malibu SunsetPhoto by Anna-Karin

Californicating

Posted on July 18, 2008

Fate is like a smart-mouthed waitress, hovering over, glaring down. I imagine her saying, Kiss my grits. “You think someone is gonna solve your problems? Sugar, let me tell you something. God helps those who help themself.” Yup. That’s how it runs sometime. Pray all you like, but don’t expect an intervention. And should your full-of-faith friends invoke the above rationale as reason not to stick out their necks, that really narrows your options. You can either pray for the existence of a benevolent deity or solve the whole damn thing yourself. Are you fucked? Not completely. But you’re treading water wearing handcuffs.

I remember my last day safely tucked in a corporate cubicle: September 2000. I was an account exec at a Santa Monica ad firm. The office was lousy, the job sucked, though they’d enticed me with verbal photographs of afternoons playing beach volleyball. Never take a job based on extracurriculars, but then again, I was twenty-five and living in Los Angeles. This can be hazardous to your health in any number of ways.

As a firm, we lived in eternal hot water. We marveled at our clients’ apparent stupidity on an almost daily basis. Why did they keep us? We wouldn’t. We would have fired us long ago. We serviced high-technology companies. Not the cool ones—we were the last place that those outfits turned. Our clients made things like semiconductors, and required awesomely dull campaigns targeting very specific nerds. We persisted on ever-dwindling profits, even when Nasdaq was running strong. And when the dot.com’s suddenly flatlined, our group—hardly an industry leader in any brand of sunny adjective, was one of the first to commence shedding weight.

One afternoon, my manager called me into the small conference room, gave me a miniature bottle of water, and told me they were laying me off. “Downsizing,” he shrugged. I sat doe eyed, staring at the table grain. I’d never been fired from anything before. A flood of questions ran through my mind. How much notice would I get? Would there be a severance package? I wondered why my boss wasn’t delivering the news. Bart was outside at his desk. His desk was twenty feet from my desk. It wasn’t like this was General Electric. I could see the idiot shuffling papers, wearing his usual shit-eating grin. Read more

Art Underground

Posted on July 16, 2008

CurtainsBy J. Scott Halem

See more of Scott’s work at www.halem.xauki.com 

Walkabout Jones wants to feature artists of all kinds. Submit your paintings, graphic art, photography and drawings to “Art Underground” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

Rose Colored Jesus

Posted on July 13, 2008

PB Proselytizing, Pacific Beach, California

“Chasing the neon rainbow”

Posted on July 8, 2008

Psy-Ride, Imperial Beach, CaliforniaPhoto by WJ

Axis of Egos

Posted on July 4, 2008

When Walter answered his phone, he was genial. “Whatever you need,” he told me casually. Walter was a congressman from North Carolina; he later coined the term freedom fries, then became the first Republican to change his mind about Iraq. This tells you a thing or two about Walter. My job was to ask semi-probing questions. I was a wire reporter for the Fayetteville Observer-Times, stationed in Washington—I’d never even been to North Carolina. My editor told me what to write, I was little more than his apple-cheeked mercenary. Military, tobacco, and the occasional soft piece were the usual items on my agenda.

I tried to pick my subjects wisely—or as shrewdly as a twenty-three year old could. I’d been pushing to write a story about the fifteen-or so folks in the state named after senator Jesse Helms. Helms was a modern political giant, loved by legions, hated by other legions, but nonetheless an historical figure. I sat in Foreign Relations hearings where Helms, the Tar Heel state’s senior senator, unfurled meaty adjectives at times when he could not abide. “Aw, that’s just plum baloney,” he’d say in his smoky mountain drawl. He tooled the marble halls of power in a sturdy, black, motorized Lark, though the Washington press corp kept this hush-hush, like Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Yes, there were better stories to chase, but I was enamored with Senator No. I wanted to ask him probing questions about what he’d learned in his time in Washington, and what he hoped to do in his final years in office.

I filed numerous press requests while my editor laughed at me for trying. But I was determined to have supper with Jesse. It became my aim, my vision quest, my lonely crusade for historical journalism before moving onto baser assignments, of which there were always many. One morning, Ed said I was to interview the state’s congressional delegation about cum found on a blue dress. “See what Jesse has to say about that.”

Okay, so my boss was a prick. Lesson learned. Not that it salvaged my tilted fate. I was poised to spend long hours talking with congressmen about splooge. It was seminal fluid that brought me to Walter. Not mine, or his, but we had to have a serious talk about another man’s juice. I sat at my desk for almost an hour, wondering how I should tackle the subject. Instead of cum, I could call it semen. “Congressman, I’d like to ask you about semen. No sir, somebody else’s semen, but nonetheless very important semen. VIP sperm.” Read more

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