There are some captions that write themselves. Somehow "Dirty Peeper and The Girls Next Door" just had to be said.
Cute, hunh? If he wasn't almost four I'd say that the Peep had some sort of Betty-and-Veronica thing going on. But he is. So he doesn't.
Notice who's wearing all the mire and who's the fastidious little mama's treasure?
Note to my son: sometimes girls like it when you get down and dirty. You won't care about this now. But come the day...you'll thank me for this.
For this springtime Friday, one of my personal favorites in the military science-fiction category: Robert Frezza.
But Frezza can bring it - and he gets right to the heart of what makes it well that war is so terrible, else we should too fond of it. His political setting (a senescent Japanese Empire, whose colonial possessions are run - increasingly poorly - by zaibatsu) is fully realized, his concepts of future warmaking are logical and have a dramatic effect on the course of the novels, and most of all his ability to draw his characters as real people, with real problems, real wishes, real illusions...well, that's a real novelist, in my book. His Anton Vereschagin, Hanna Bruwer and Danny Meagher are as fully realized as any of the fictional people you met in school: Hamlet, Lizzy Bennett, Ramona Quimby...
Something about being up before dawn...
Well, time to go to work. Mojo's at her meeting, Peep's at daycare and I have a mountain to climb. Gotta leave the chair empty and the computer alone and go struggle for the legal tender.
This is the mother of all storm drains. It runs down the centre of the main street than goes from the public road, all the way through what used to be Rodman Naval Station, Howard Air Force Base, Ft. Kobbe and down past Venado Drop Zone to the little Panamanian town of Venado.
political infighting in Honduras and Guatemala, where the "legitimate" governments turned their soldiers loose on "unreliable elements", mostly poor indios unhappy with generations of grinding poverty at the hands of "los dorados", the Golden Ones, the still-ruling descendants of the Spanish younger sons who had taken everything from them four hundred and fifty years before and left them only God and scraps of land to choke a living from.
Pretty, hunh?
I’ve been posting about war and politics, well, pretty much since I started doing the blog thing last summer. I had to look back through my own archive to check. There it was: July 22, 2006 – actually, it was the sixth post out of what (I had to check this, too) is now one hundred and six entries. “Saturday Morning, 4am.” A rumination on Iraq and our involvement there, which concluded with my attempt at wit: "I am SO fucked!".
Let me explain.
For those of you not (or not yet) cognoscenti of quality children’s entertainment, I will first introduce our hero. Diego is a hyperkinetic little guy whose job is described as “animal rescuer”. He is handsome in a cartoony sort of way (unlike his cousin Dora, whose frighteningly immense head always reminds me of a watermelon with eyes or a blimp in a wig), athletic and good and kind. He is a sort of grade-school D’Artagnan, swashing – okay, swinging - his buckle through the rain forest with his furry Planchet, Baby Jaguar. He is always busy getting various incompetent animals out of trouble; I was amazed at the frequency with which animals get stuck in, trapped on or under and endangered by natural objects. Why, you’d suspect they were animal actors who actually lived in Venice Beach and only went into the jungle to shoot a “Diego” episode, only to find the jungle has no safety rails. Curious, really…
Sorry. The Peeper luuurves him some Diego, se we both get to see a lot of Diego and his crew setting about getting other critters out of trouble. They do this using their wits, and cooperating with each other. And they always have to keep an eye open for the Bobo Brothers.
The Bobos are described on Diego’s website as a “pair of wild, mischievous spider monkeys…always causing trouble, setting traps, upsetting nests, breaking dams, or bringing down mudslides.”
Now it’s important to understand that the Bobos aren’t truly evil. They’re just greedy, and stupid, and like most greedy, stupid people and animals they don’t think about much other than what they want to slake their immediate needs. So when Diego and BJ are trying to, say, cross a river, the Bobos will take their boat. And their rope. And the bridge, if they can get it. They don’t mean to cause harm, but they are only thinking about their own, immediate desires.
Okay? Now, for the past six years and more we here in the U.S. have been ruled by a government composed of Republican partisans of one man, George W. Bush, who is very likely the ideologically simple minded brother of another man, Richard Cheney. Together they have been our national leadership through perhaps the most dramatic six years since 1941. And in pursuit of their goals, we have seen countries attacked, invaded and occupied in a war that goes on today, is going on the very moment you are reading this.
Somewhere; in a side street in Baghdad, down a dusty road outside Baquoba, near a deserted house on the road to Damascus a young man is lying face-down in the dirt. The muscles in his legs are still twitching as the brain that refuses to realize its’ body is dying tries to keep running, to keep living for just one more moment.
Somewhere in the low hills of Diyala province a ten-year old boy is staring at the ripped end of his leg where a moment ago his foot had felt the solid thump of boot on ball that he will never feel again. Somewhere in a hot, tired building in Tal Afar a little crowd tries to push a shrieking woman outside so they can wind the violated corpse of her husband or son in a dirty sheet to carry him to the hole where they can put him and the rest of her life in the dry sandy soil that blows across the plains of ancient Babylon.
None of this matters. Not the grieving parents, not the dead men and women, not the relentless ruin and merciless hatred that have made these dead, these sorrows. Because the people who are running this war – Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their ilk – have no intention of doing anything to change it or stop it. For them, to leave, to stop, is to lose. Unless they can do this in a way that gets them what they want. The way they want it.
This is Bobo logic. And Bobo logic doesn’t yield to reason, for the very simple fact is that is has no basis in fact. Bobos don’t know, or care, why they take your rope, your boat, your youth or your life. They simply do, because they’re Bobos and that’s what they do.
Sure, they may offer you something glib. But that’s just to make you feel a little less cheated. They are going to do what they want to do and nothing that you can do will change that.
Except. Diego and his friends know that to stop them, Animal Rescuers need to say, "Freeze, Bobos!" You don’t argue with them. You don’t debate them, or try to understand them, or compromise with them. You simply have to say:
“Freeze, Bobos!”
And they will.
But go watch the news. Go read the newspaper. We are all afraid to tell the Bobos to freeze. Afraid they will call us cowards. Afraid they will blame us for “losing”. Afraid they will release their bobo legion of vituperative, impassioned droogs and we will be savaged for our “fear” and “weakness” for looking away from the awful, endless, insoluble smash before us.
In January, 2009, the Bobos will have to go back to their bobo land of wealth and insouciance, and a new leadership will have to try and figure out how to get us out of the mess the Bobos have created. If they can.
I’ve tried to make the point that we’re in trouble; again, and again, and again. And again. But from the lack of comments, Dear Reader, I suspect that, like Diego, you have had other things on your mind, other animals to rescue. Or perhaps you have just given up. Or perhaps you have nothing to add. But I've realized that between now and 2009, there’s no more for me to say. I've said all I have to say. Nothing I say will change anything. Nothing I say will help. I'm done.
I still like to write, and so I’ll have more to say here, on other things and other ideas, both for my own introspection and for any those of you who want to read it.
But on the subject of Iraq, and war, and America and the Middle East, I will write no more. 
I like to think that, as a blogger, I keep my eye on what's important. Family, home, work, politics, soccer, the Army, religion, liquid soap, friends and relatives, the collected work of Robert Frezza... It's these sorts of things that make life the marvelous cavalcade of change it is. As we pass dreaming through the vales of our lives, each new vista terminating our hopes and dreams in the accession of the new joy or sorrow it reveals, we are challenged to meet these events with all of our spirit, all of our energy, and all of our intellect. As such, I understand the duty of those of us who write for the public to provide an open and honest account of our ideas, beliefs and feelings, to try and write about things that make a difference to others, things that are, well, important.
Poor Peep. He had a tough evening this past Thursday. We had too much fun and excitement before bedtime, so when it came time for the tub and the jammies and all he pretty much collapsed on himself in a screaming, sobbing heap, a sort of Chernobyl core meltdown in grubby corduroy pants.
The CCAA processed two days of international adoption referrals in April.
So...let's say (and why not) that you have no religion. You're churchless. Agnostic, atheist, godless, heathen, vile apostate...you have no faith. No god. Your devotional intensity has expired. It's an ex-religion. It's pining for the fjords. Get the picture?
DAMN can the man draw....
Oh, yeah. He's witty. And funny. All his women are smart, sexy and dangerous. All his men are loveably stalwart and dumb. All his cats are inscrutible. In other words: everything you always wanted in a cartoonist...and more!
Now the Bush was more gladhandy than any Shrub of the field which the ROVE God had made. And he said unto the Dowd, Yea, hath the Founders said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
