Train

I seen somethin’ strange once.  It was out west, and it was a little differnt than anything you ever heard of.  I was a little bit kinda down on my luck a few years back and was ridin the rails, thought maybe I could get me some timber work out by Vancouver, or maybe the salmon fleets were hirin’ out of La Push.  One drizzly night me an some other tramps was floppin’ under a cliff next to a rail bridge on the St. Joe river up near the Kootenai valley, waitin for the 3:05 Union Pacific out a’ Coeur d’Alene.  We useta set up a little jungle by the trestle, where the 3:05 had to slow way down on the straightaway just before the bridge took a hard curve across the river gorge.  The engineer was a friendly, an didn’ much care what kinda boardin’ passes we had, or didn’t.

This particlar night, this little eye-talian feller name of Goosheppy had clumb all the way down the gorge and speared hisself a chinook salmon and diced it into a big pot of mulligan over a fire he made by the slagheap from the old tapped out copper mine.  He passed around a mason jar a’ shine and we was all hunkered down under a big lean-to a’ tin siding, outta the rain.  The rain thrummed on the corrugated tin, soundin’ like a endless round a’ polite applause, as we squatted there talkin, lyin’ about the places we’d been, spittin Mail Pouch into the mud, and usin’ fishribs as toothpicks.  Scared Eddie was regalin’ us with stories about his days on a bomber crew in the Eighth Air Force.  Me, I mainly left things out a my stories, but told some, too.

The engineer on the 3:05 usually seen us an’ just waved, ’cause he knew we knew the bulls only patrolled the city yards, an’ never made it out here to the mountains.  Sometimes though he’d  wave us off if he weren’t pullin no deadhead boxcars, or if the switchyard bulls was out to meet a quota by roustin’ some bums off their turf.  His shift ended up at Bonner’s Ferry so this was his milk run.  Sometimes the milk runs sour though for some fellers, I’ll get to that.

Gotta tell you now ’bout Towser, a old three-legged one-eyed stray mutt that kinda adopted me a couple years before, back in East St. Louis.  Ol’ Towser had this uncanny knack for knowin about stuff that’s gonna happen, kinda like the gift a’ seein’ that them brujos has, down in New Mexico.  One time back in West Virginia, I had just helped some ol’ boys clear out a seam of anthracite from a family mine back in some unnamed holler, an’ was camped out by a little crick, when Towser just up an’ lit out, flyin’ up to the top of the ridge, then runnin’ back to yip at me an’ drag my pants cuff to move me along.  He done that back an’ forth a few times, gettin’ more ‘n more wound up each time.  Well not fifteen minutes later, just as I crested the ridge and was wonderin’ what all his commotion was about, a flash flood filled that holler and warshed that campsight right down the gulley, leavin’ nothing but mud an’ trees, all broke up like kindlin’.  That was the first time I seen Towser act up like that before somethin’ big broke loose, but it weren’t the last, I’ll tell you what.

Anyhow, ol’ Towser was our freight train alarm clock, an would usually start yappin’ and run over to the track an get in a kinda half crouch, half point, and then–you could measure it on a clock–we would hear the train comin 5 minutes later.  We’d douse the fire, take down the jungle and wrap up our swag just in time for the trainwhistle to get into earshot.  Towser would clamber right on up onto a flatbed or a box car only after he was sure I was aboard.

Well, I remember this partic’lar night clear as a bell.  After the rain let up the hunters moon showed through in places.  But the sky was still holdin’ water, kinda misty low and cloudy high, with clear spots driftin’ through.  Around 5 til 3, Towser started actin a little peculiar.  He simpered and whimpered and slunk off all bellycrawlin’, ’til he was fast up against the rock cliff on the far side of camp.  He parked his hind end an’ sat there quiet, with his good eye starin up the tracks all furtive an shifty an worried like.   We all heard the whistle about the same time, only this time, instead of a low occasional moan, it was steady an’ shrill, an’ getting too loud too fast.   Just about the time the clouds broke an the moonlight put everything around in a sort of ghostly pale glow, we all seen the train’s headlight crestin’ the cutout that’d been blasted through the last mountain pass before the river.  Towser looked scared, like if he’d been wearin’ pants he’d a wet ‘em, like he wanted to crawl right inside the escarpment.  The train came down the last straightaway, only instead a’ slowin’ like it always did, this time it was pickin’ up speed.  And this time, instead a’ the engineer wavin’ and noddin’ like he usually did, he was starin’ straight ahead with his face pulled back into the grimace of a dead man who found out just at the last minute what was coming.  Well the dead man’s pedal hadn’t got the message yet, ’cause that diesel was ballin’ the jack, just like to flyin’ down that last straight section a’ track.  Last time I seen a face like that feller’s was when I was a young’un, the day a air bubble got in my uncle Willis’ heart an’ it blew up. Well the doc said he was deader’n James Dean before he ever got dragged under the combine.  That combine made a perfect circle in the winter wheat that day, till it run outta gas.  I know Uncle Willis ain’t never been to England, an’ didn’t make them crop circles over there nohow, but that never stopped his inlaws from castin’ aspersions about him ever’ chance they got, god rest his soul an’ ta hell with theirs.

Anyways, back to this one night.  Where the track turns sharp and goes over the river, the train kept goin’ straight that night.  The bridge timbers groaned and creaked and finally snapped, and the train arc’ed out over the river and fell straight down, lookin just like a giant slow-motion rolly-coaster.  Just about the time we seen the red light of the last car blinkin’ kind of calm and lazy into the mist, we all noticed the same thing, the strangest thing of all, that night.  Kind of a eerie hush fell over the river gorge, all’s we could hear was the river an’ the wind, an’ a loon, real far off.  No explosion, no sound of metal crashing into rock, no sparks, no nothin’.  Goosheppy climbed down the gorge an’ came back an’ said there was no train, no wreck, no dead engineer, just the river an’ the rocks ‘an the pale white glow of the moon and the sound of the wind whistlin’ down the gorge through the broken trestle.  He stood there shiverin’ like he was colder’n a well-digger’s ass, an struck dumb to boot.  Me an’ Towser lit out down the tracks in the direction a’ Coeur d’Alene an’ turned south on the first road we got to, where I stuck out my thumb.  Just about the time the sky turned the color of Velveeta, we was gettin’ settled in the back of a Roadmaster wagon driven by a feller who was headin’ toward Amarillo to do some roughneckin’.  Me an’ Towser got work as rodeo clowns the next spring outside a’ Las Cruces.  Me an’ Towser hasn’t been on a freight train ever since…

Thirsty

Black Power vs. White Trash

After watching the Democratic National Convention last week, and from what I have seen of the Republican National Convention so far, I have, for the first time in a long time, a vague and unfamiliar feeling of–what is this?  Is it optimism? Is it hope?–of guardedly positive anticipation, maybe, that this country will soon be on a new and improved trajectory.  No, scratch that.  I am still too cynical for that.  Maybe what I feel is relief, that the socio-politico-economic mudslide we have been riding will soon come grinding to a halt.  Yeah, that’s it:  Not that things are automatically going to get better once the current presidential outfit is out of office, but that the injury they have done and continue to do to the country will stop being exacerbated.  Like the farmer who comes up out of his storm cellar after an F5 tornado, surveys the flattened wreckage of what used to be his farm and his crops, and says “Look, Ma, ain’t it grand the wind stopped blowin’?”  (To paraphrase Bill W., may mad props always be with his legacy).

Amiable Dunce

My personal political cynicism began in 1980, with the Reagan presidency.  I have tried for years to understand the nearly idolatrous cult of hero-worship that surrounds the Reagan legacy, and I just can’t fathom it.  When it was first announced that he had dementia, part of me felt a little bit sorry for him, but part of me was at the same time screaming in my head “No shit Sherlock!  How did that escape everyone’s notice from 1980 on?? His own biographer had to make his story less vapid by inventing characters and other shit about his life!  Seasoned and intelligent foreign policy insiders called him things like ‘amiable dunce’ and wrote books about him called ‘Sleepwalking Through History’, for god’s sake!”  And his defenders assert that he surrounded himself with good people.  And I wonder to them “Who, exactly?”  James Watt was a lawyer for strip miners, who was put in charge of Interior, which put him in charge of our natural resources.  When questioned about global warming, his response was “wear more sunscreen”  Ray Donovan, who dodged questions about legal ties to mob figures, was in charge of Labor.  Nice fit.  And after the inquiry, he asked “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”, to which the logical response should have been “Dude, you work for Reagan! What fucking reputation are you referring to?!?”  And Alexander ‘I am in charge! My finger is on the button, and to hell with rules of succession!’ Haig, whose closet ambitions were laid bare during the drama after the assassination attempt.  And various gunsels, thugs, miscreants and ne’er-do-wells like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and William Casey and Ollie North and Robert McFarlane and John Negroponte and Caspar Weinberger and multiple felons Ollie North and John Poindexter, all of whom basically said fuck the constitution, we’ll do what we want.  Which they did, in the Iran-Contra affair (Hey! Let’s illegally sell these weapons to Iran through Isreal, and then secretly use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, in DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION!  C’mon, it’ll be fun!!), the illegal war in Grenada, the illegal war on working people (firing the air traffic controllers), the fuck-the-poor trickle-down Reaganomic policy (which by the way was ultimately discredited by its own architect), the October Surprise (which almost fucked Jimmy Carter out of a legacy altogether, had he not been born with more character and integrity and intelligence in his little pinkie  (and unfortunately far less cutthroat political savvy) than everyone in every Reagan and Bush administration put together had, ever).

He was a god damn puppet!

This is the crowd that surrounded Reagan, cynically taking advantage of his advancing feeblemindedness and decrepitude to advance their megalomaniacal agendas.  And his defenders assert that he was the right man for the times, and I wonder to them “What part, exactly?  The tripling of the national debt? The quadrupling of the national deficit? The subverting of the Constitution, which that smug bastard North had the unmitigated gall to brag about, in front of Congress?  The fact that the U.S. went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation by the time he was done? No, really, which thing do you like about his legacy?”   And they mutter something about the fall of communism.  Which only proves that Mikhail Gorbachev was as much of a sucker for the Reagan charisma as his other worshipers are.  Even so, the Soviet Union’s collapse had as much to do with the expense of (and the resulting social disillusionment of the population, due to) the Soviets’ prolonged military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Southeast Asia (holy shit! sound familiar, anyone?) as with some bellicose orangutan from the West showing its red ass about communism.

Like a cross between Mr. Rogers, Don Knotts, and some Macchiavellian nightmare…

My cynicism continued through the G.H.W. Bush years, which were thankfully cut short when he threw ‘92 to the Dems because he had to issue first term pardons to the Iran Contra crowd, which would have basically been political suicide had he continued to be president after that.  No, really.  He would never have been able to survive the scrutiny and investigations of that little saga of corruption and subversion, along with the probing of his role (and likely exploitation of CIA connections) in the October Surprise, that helped get him and Reagan into office to begin with.

Clinton

We did have what the Onion called “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity…characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas” during which Republicans demonstrated a) a willingness to spend $40 million investigating secret blowjobs, and b) that there were really no depths to their venality, and their desire to undermine any foreign or domestic policy achievement he ever tried to make.  They just couldn’t fucking stand that his shit worked, and theirs didn’t.  It drove them fucking nuts, which was fun and a little bit sickening to watch  as it played out on the national stage.

What the hell were we thinking?

Along came W., which got my cynicism kicked into full gear.  In 2000, I thought that the best case was, we had an affable goofball, a slaphappy windbag, a country-club chucklehead, who if not for an accident of birth and the backing of a family who would stop at NOTHING to grab and maintain political power, would have aspired to maybe, at the most, be qualified to be regional manager of some “84 Lumber” stores, with the politial skills to lead local chapter of the Kiwanis or Rotary International.  He brought all this heavy-handed religiosity to the table, along with a great whopping shitload of absolute ignorance.  I used to get involved in these epic on-line debates and discussions about the role of religion in government, with a group of political and religious conservatives.  Both sides and many nuances in between would chime in, but sometimes after carefully debunking “Christian Nation” myth by documenting the Deism of the founding fathers, and their specific intent NOT to make this a Christian Nation;  I would invariably end up trotting out ridiculously inarticulate shit like “No fucking way our country was founded on those principles!  Our country was founded by people getting on little wooden boats and sailing the fuck AWAY from those principles!”  And then I would sputter on my keyboard and wait for my neck veins to subside.

I got what what-do-you-call-it, “outrage fatigue”, along about year 5 1/2 of the current Bush regime.  I mean, was that really the best we could do?  And was that the best the Dems could do, to counter it?  Really?  Al Gore is honorable and well-intentioned, but he allowed the media to steamroll him with the Love Canal and Love Story and inventing the internet stories.  They were–and are–all easily debunkable lies, but NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO PUSH BACK! (fwiw:  Tim Berners-Lee, who actually sort of did invent the world wide web, gave Al Gore all due props for the legislative initiatives that provided for its funding and creation.  If anyone would actually bother to go back and read Gore’s remarks IN THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THEY WERE MADE, they would realize that the whole claim to inventing the internet story is a hoax, originated and perpetrated by the likes of Limbaugh and other screaming douche bags).   And in 2004, the swift boaters succesfully painted John Kerry, more of a war hero than, let’s see, ANYONE in W.’s draft-dodging, military-obligation-shirking, hypocritically-bombastic-jingoism-spewing circle of acquaintances and advisors, as some kind of lying glory-hog.  Again, easily debunkable by the public record, but NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO PUSH BACK!.  Kerry, brave in combat, showed his fucking belly to a bunch of lying assholes.  That illustrates exactly how Clinton, with all his moral failings, survived (and even thrived) politically, in the toxic political climate that marred his years.  He pushed back, every single time.  Even when he was a) lying, and b) wrong. At least he made the other side fight for their victories.

After we got W. the second time, I sort of had to give up being overtly pissed off about it.  I had to give up the epic lunch-table verbal sparring (I work with a bunch of absolute frothing, Reagan nutsack-licking, W-behavior-justifying-no-matter-how-egregious-and-incompetent-the-freshly-perpetrated-outrage-against-common-sense-and-common-decency, Kool-Aid drinking wing-nuts), and watching shit like Crossfire and the Sunday morning bobble-head shows, and reading shit that would make my blood boil.  Every once in a while I will stump them though, by asking what exactly they are proud of or satisfied with, in regard to W’s legacy.  Hahaha.  But all the same, I came to a kind of resigned acceptance that as a country we get exactly the kind of government we deserve, and if the majority of people vote for it (I KNOW!  THEY DIDN’T! AMONG OTHER IRREGULARITIES AND OUTRAGES AND VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND OUTRIGHT FRAUD, THE OWNER OF THE COMPANY THAT MAKES THE GOD DAMN VOTING MACHINES PLEDGED OUT LOUD AND IN PUBLIC THAT HE WOULD DO EVERYTHING IN HIS POWER TO ENSURE THE ELECTION AND RE-ELECTION OF BUSH!  WTF? I MEAN SERIOUSLY!  WHAT.THE.FUCK.QUESTION MARK.EXCLAMATION POINT.  (sigh. deep breath. fuck it. caps lock off.)), then that is what we will be saddled with.   The one remarkable achievement of W’s presidential career is that he successfully pulled off the impossible task of making his father, incompetent boob and bastion of mediocrity that he was, seem like a fucking statesman of genius.  At least, if you grade on the curve.   Note:  I have been a huge fan of the Bush family ever since I found out that their fortune was made by Prescott Bush, who had major holdings and investments in Thyssen Steel and other German industrial concerns that financed and fueled the Nazi rise to power, and that Bush only pulled out when the U.S. froze his assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act in 1942 (THREE YEARS AFTER HITLER BEGAN FUCKING EUROPE, BY THE WAY), and that 60 years later, a civil action for damages was brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz. Nice fucking family, just the kind of people you want in charge of your country.  Fuckers.

Yeah, yeah.  Whatever.

But this Obama guy, he seems like someone I can get enthusiastic about. Based on nothing more than he seems to be level headed, seems to want the job more than Gore or Kerry ever did, and that he already has more respect and credibility in the rest of the world than W. ever had.  And maybe, just maybe, people are finally realizing that the religio-political conservatism that has influenced and dominated public discourse for a generation, represents a consistently wrong, discredited and dying ideology.   I know, maybe I am just drinking some different flavor of Kool-Aid here.  But I am really fucking thirsty, and have been for too long.