the rix mix

Maybe The Prez should have made his own brief statement before sending Sec. Napolitano out to explain. But there's nothing he can do in Washington at this point he can't do in Hawaii. It isn't like he needs to consult personally with Rep. Peter King. King does no good ranting about "enemy combatant" & "military trial." Pete's had some dubious connections of his own to suspicious organizations & potentially dangerous aliens. The surest way to put Umar Farouk away for good is to protect whatever constitutional rights he has & prove him guilty of criminal acts in a federal trial.

Americans want but have no patience for the kind of airport security used by Israel's El Al, the only nearly fail safe system. El Al passengers don't need constant, alarming reminders & elevated security threat levels. It doesn't take an Umar Farouk incident for El Al to tighten security. El Al assumes there's always an Umar Farouk trying to get on the plane, & that's why many people fly El Al. El Al also thinks about possible Farouks on the ground with missile launchers.

We're in a hurry.

We ought to be more concerned than we are about potential homegrown Islamic terrorists; disaffected American-born sons of honest, loyal immigrants who came here & worked 16 hour days in corner convenience stores to put those sons through American colleges. Some young people become radicalized because they aren't yet wise enough to accept that reality never fits ideals perfectly & never will. They're merely educated. They're attracted to older people who don't believe in adapting ideals to positive, practical purposes; the ideologues. The ideologue teachers don't want to be the martyrs. They feel guilty for not having become martyrs for their ideologies when they were younger. So their personal practical purpose has become teaching the ideology.

I was fortunate. I came of age in an era of radicals. I've always been attracted to egalitarian ideas & lifestyles, but I dislike when they are strictly codified. I saw that the "meritocracy" of radicalism, left & right, sectarian & secular, is dominated by blowhards & bullies. When you play in a rock & roll band & smoke pot, you don't have much patience for tracts, sermons, & manifestos, much less people telling you your music isn't contributing to The Revolution. Sorry, pal, but what you don't understand is that music is the freakin' revolution. You're the bummer bystander who won't dance.

Poet Phillip Whalen wrote that the poems of Frank O'Hara are more important than the Sayings of Chairman Mao. They are, in fact, more important than the Sayings of Jesus, because when you reduce a life, any life, to bunch of printed & memorized sayings & rules, you lose the person. Jefferson's Bible lost Jesus. So does the red letter Kings James in the hands of a fundamentalist. The sayings of Chairman Mao lose the human being responsible for the deaths of many millions. I'm not using Whalen's statement to teach about Whalen or O'Hara. Go read their poems. There's little doubt in my mind that young, middle class men sitting at the feet of radical, bearded mullahs lose Mohammed.

Do we want to submit to random bag searches at train stations? After 9/11, I wanted police to search my backpack before I got on PATH, because it was usually filled with old records & weighed about fifteen pounds. They never did. This jazz group is led by a tuba player. I was offered $30 for The Misfits 45. Remember The Blues Magoos?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, in the news, WFMU