Political Stand-Up

[Tara Carreon]

[Tara Carreon]

Charles delivered this at the Sky Bar in Tucson last Wednesday (not yesterday) in an extremely powerful, roaring voice.

[Tara Carreon]

Charles delivered this one last night at the Sky Bar in Tucson

[Tara Carreon]

I performed this last night at the open mic at SkyBar in Tucson. I had a nerf ball gun that I pulled out at the beginning, and shot nerf balls all over the crowd while yelling "Bullet-points!". "Odious" is the emcee at the SkyBar. He said it was my best delivery yet. He's SUCH an egotist. Since it was inspired by him!

The Ralph Nader Library now sponsors open mics every Friday night. See this link for some samples http://tucsonopenmic.com/

BULLET-POINTS
by Tara Carreon

Odious got in my face
“You talked too long
You go on and on
Look at those people
This place is a bar
Think about where you are
Be more concise
Be precise
Bullet Points!"
• Primitive man comes into being due to unknown causes
• Man becomes man in the ice age 100,000 years ago when many other animals become extinct. Was it mass death that spurred the first humans to extraordinary life?
• Families, love, babies that take a long time to mature
• Art
• Music
• Language
• Rhetoric
• Politics
• City-States
• Slavery
• Evolution stops when Man-Woman is enslaved
• Mind control
• Fear of the outside
• Shadow world-garbage dump is where we put all our fears
• Shadow world gets bigger and bigger
• Bandits invade Shadow world and destroy humanity from their invisible place
• Bandits are the only people left, then they cannibalize each other
• Bandits fight until Hegel-Marx’s “Last Man” is left
• “Last Man” commits suicide
BULLET-POINTS!

[Tara Carreon]

I performed this last night at the Sky Bar, and will perform it again at our open mic on Saturday:

Who Will Care If the Earth Exists After All the Humans are Dead?


You know, there’s hardcore porn, and softcore porn. Hardcore porn is explicit vaginal or anal sex, eating pussy, sucking cock, guys ejaculating all over girls’ faces, extreme bondage, etc., and softcore porn is nudity and representations of sexual intercourse or masturbation with no penetration. Everybody’s seen examples of the hardcore stuff on the Internet, and Playboy is an example of softcore porn.

Similarly, there’s hardcore nihilism and softcore nihilism. "Nihilism" comes from the Latin word nihil, or nothing, that which does not exist. It is in the word "annihilate," meaning to destroy completely. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Jacobi used the word to negatively characterize transcendental idealism. Ivan Turgenev, in his book “Fathers and Sons” (1862) used "nihilism" to describe a creed of total negation. So hardcore nihilism is like the Church of Euthanasia or Gaia Liberation Front, people who advocate the death of all human life on the planet supposedly because they care for the earth so much. Then there's the Nazis, Skull & Bones, the apocalyptic Christians, the Pentagon and the CIA. Softcore nihilism is when the death cult is hidden in symbols and poetry and religious philosophy.

A friend of mine sent me a poem which he says talks about truth and beauty in a way that resonates with him. It’s called “Magna Est Veritas,” which comes from the proverb Magna est veritas et praevalebit, which means, “The truth is great and it shall prevail,” from an ancient Greek version of the Biblical book of Ezra. The poem, by Coventry Patmore, reads as follows:

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

One of my main interests is in philosophy, particularly critiquing nihilism, and I saw nihilism everywhere in this poem. With my philosophical “crystal ball,” I read it as follows:

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
[The dead thing is “here” given consciousness; corporations are people]
Where, twice a day,
[Time and duality arise]
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
[Existentialism]
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
[Self-Sacrifice/Image of head under a Guillotine]
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
[Nihilism]
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot
[Inducing trauma with images of lies and putrefaction]
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
[The "truth” is death]
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
[Mass murder; Church of Euthanasia]

I made a report once about the Church of Euthanasia/Gaia Liberation Front to the FBI, because they are terrorists. Their mission statement reads “Our mission is the total liberation of the Earth, which can be accomplished only through the extinction of the Humans as species.” Iggy Pop wrote a song about these people called “Til Wrong Feels Right,” and one of the verses reads:

God and his captains
They wanna pull the fucking plug
They wanna pull the fucking plug
And give the skies
Back to the birds and bugs

So I rewrote this poem by Mr. Patmore from a non-nihilist perspective. It’s called “Who will care if the earth exists after all the humans are dead?”

Here, in the bright citadel of my mind
Full of meaning and purpose
Where, without division of time
The glad compassion arises and glows
In the company of the enlightened ones
Far from conditioned and insensate reality
I sit me down
I and the world are one
Love will never die
Intelligence is great, and enlightenment will prevail
When with single-minded purpose
Everyone extols the virtues of human life

Thank you.

[Tara Carreon]

It's Too Late for No Bible

I go to the chiropractor three times a week for a bad back injury I've had since I was in 6th grade. My chiropractor had just returned from a very short vacation -- Wednesday to Tuesday -- and it was Wednesday, the day after she returned, and her office had more people in it than usual. There was a young, pretty girl there --- tall, with long hair -- with a pained expression on her face and in her voice, a bit frantic and distraught, looking for her mother and apparently, a quick chiropractic treatment. Chiropractic Bob -- it's a husband-wife team, which I didn't know about when I chose her to be my Chiropractic Jane -- had her lay down on his table while Chiropractic Jane hooked me up to the stretching machine. There are two tables in the room: Bob and Jane are Communists, and they don't even know it.

My face is turned towards the wall, but obviously, I can hear Chiropractic Bob talking to the pretty girl. He's disturbed because she's disturbed. My chiropractors are gentle people. They're conservatives, but gentle. Unless you start talking politics, then a suppressed fierceness comes out in Bob. But no politics are being discussed here, so he is feeling gentle.

He expressed a lot of concern for why she was unhappy, trying to draw out her story. She would only go so far as to say that living in Denver had been a really bad trip -- apparently she hadn't resided in a fashionable area of town. But there were lots of other things she didn't say. Perhaps a lifetime of things. And then I met her mother, and knew why. It was her mother. She was crazier than a loon.

I'd seen her there before, and hadn't noticed anything crazy about her then. She seemed very sincere. I remember listening and looking closely at her, to see if I could get some clue as to whether I might like her or not. I hadn't been able to get any. Until now.

Maybe she had started to feel comfortable around me and decided to open up. She started talking about God and the Bible.

She started by making a few remarks that I didn't pay much attention to, but I did notice when Chiropractic Bob started talking a little defensively, in a very low-key, controlled voice, very diplomatic -- the guy should BE a diplomat. Apparently she'd already twisted his arm, because he mentioned that there was a Bible in every hotel room he stayed in during his short vacation in San Diego, and he read something about Nebuchadnezzar and other things that confused him. That was such a subtle way of pushing her back. Chiropractic Bob is really a very skillful communicator.

Preacher Lady kept coming on. He responded lightly, and subtly changed the subject.

She kept coming. He feinted and parried.

She would have been one helluva fencer, and that's what she was. You know, some people are certain kinds of animals or mythological creatures or embody a particular kind of personality. My husband Pan has often commented that if I were a man, I would be in prison for killing someone.

Preacher Lady's like a rattlesnake, a heat-seeker with infrared targeting, looking for an ear to send her ideas into like a missile down an airshaft.

She has a way of staying long past her due date. When all the energy has died out, when you think she's surely on her way outta Dodge now, and she's saying, "Well, I better go. I'm probably keeping you from something important," she's only bluffing. "Am I or aren't I keeping you from your work?" she asks, inquiring whether she can stay longer. Waiting for him to say, "Oh, that's okay, I enjoy talking with you." He mumbles something incoherent.

Poor man, he's incoherent because the Preacher Lady is after him. That's when she goes in for the kill.

She prefaces her death strike by saying, as if she's marshalling all her courage, as if she is about to do something really, really brave, like storm the Bastille, she says to no one in particular, "If I don't do it now, I'll never do it."

"DO WHAT?" we're all asking ourselves, dreadfully fearing what is to come. I'm starting to sink through the table, become disembodied, turn into molecules, and pass through walls. I feel like I'm pure spirit at this point. I'm a deer in the mouth of a lion. Why fight it anymore, I know I'm going to die. I become limp, and the lion gets on with her business, chewing me up while I'm still alive. My meat is becoming tender with my own fear. "Yum, yum," says the lion.

"What are you doing Saturday or Sunday afternoon?" she asks Chiropractic Bob. "You don't work on Saturdays, do you?" She's real smooth. Expresses no anxiety. She's in no hurry.

He mumbles something incoherent again.

"Why don't you come over for a barbecue? You like meat, don't you?" Her unspoken words are reassuring: "It's just a friendly request. You don't have to get excited."

He says, "So you have a barbecue pit, do you?" Bob's thinking about pits now, because if he had one, he'd hide in it like a foxhole until the barrage passed.

Preacher Lady says, "Yeah, my husband likes to barbecue. We'll get some really good meat and barbecue it." At this point I think she might be talking about him. Is he the meat that's going to get barbecued? Because she just skewered him through and through: in one side and out the other. Just lay him on the grill and barbecue him quick, before this vampire drinks his blood!

With his next to the last dying breath, he says a friend called while they were on vacation, and wanted to get together, so he needed to talk with this guy and Bob's social secretary (Chiropractic Jane) before he could give her an answer.

Preacher Lady is happily slurping up his blood with her long, forked tongue. She says, "Well, will you know by Friday? If I call you on Friday, will you know by then?" You can hear the phone ringing on Friday, on and on, as Bob refuses to answer it.

His back to the wall, Chiropractic Bob attempts to launch an offensive, and asks Preacher Lady if she's paying for her daughter's treatment, since she doesn't have a job. Subtly humiliated that Bob has evaded her barbecue proposition by rudely talking about filthy lucre and her daughter's lack thereof, she punishes everyone by sacrificing the prostrate girl to appease her own anger, answering Bob's question with a knifelike stab, indifferent as an Aztec priest extracting the last heart of the day -- "My daughter is a loser reject of society." At that point it becomes obvious that the girl's already dead, and can't be killed again. In a zombie voice, she says, "When I get a job, I won't be a reject anymore."

Shortly after, with the future barbecue still hovering in the distance like a mirage that Preacher Lady had conjured up and turned demonic, with Bob rotating on a spit, she left with her zombie offspring. A huge sense of relief sweeps the room as the door closes behind them.

Before I had become paralyzed with fear, and started physically disintegrating, and passing through walls, thoughts had been going through my head which told me to do terrible things, like "Get up off the table right now, walk up to her, put your face in her face, and tell her 'Shut the fuck up and get the hell out!'" If I wasn't disempowered by politeness, that is exactly what I would have done. I WANTED to give her a taste of her own medicine. I wanted to express MY views. That I am sick and tired of listening to this religion bullshit everywhere I go. America seems to think it's one big evangelical church where everybody gets to witness to everyone else.

In recent years, I have started fighting back. I have a bumpersticker with a picture of Michelangelo's wrathful God pointing his finger at Adam that says, "God is a tyrant!" I have another bumpersticker that says, "Keep your religion to yourself." Another bumpersticker says, "Unity is communism." And another one says, "Fuck Hegel." Another one says, "No Death Cults." I only stop short of saying "God is an asshole." After all, I want to keep breathin' right.

Last month, my husband and I were in New York attending my daughter Maria's graduation. When we met her at the restaurant just after arriving on the subway from Times Square, she breathlessly told us that she had just told two Bible-thumpers sitting on a park bench to throw their Bible in the garbage, because their beliefs were complete nonsense. It was like that scene from Zeffirelli's "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," where Francis of Assisi, having discovered for the first time that the dyers in his father's fabric factory are working in dungeon-like darkness, leads them outside for an impromptu picnic in the light, then heads upstairs to the storehouse filled with richly-colored bolts of fabric and silk brocades, and throws them out the window by the armload, all the while warning the passersby who are eagerly gathering up his miserly father's suddenly liberated wealth -- "No. No, my brothers. Don't touch that. Throw it into the gutter. Throw it all away! It will only make you miserable. Look at my poor father! It will never make you happy! Throw it all away! Burn it, my brothers, all of it. Our treasures are in Heaven, not here on Earth. Throw it all away. Be free."

Maria was excited that she'd been brave enough to express her godless views to a pair of faith-fools, and she attributed her boldness to my inspiration. It was rather like the time when she nailed a loud-talking white boy in high school for saying that Mexicans were only fit for working at Pizza Hut. Put him on the ground with one punch. Of course her dad took her down a notch there by expressing his disappointment that she'd resorted to Nazi tactics in response to mere speech. Tisk, tisk. The next day Maria apologized to the High School Vice Principal for having acted like a Nazi, leaving him speechless.

Well after Maria had vented her excitement, our younger daughter Ana started lecturing us about the need for religious tolerance. Ana is sympathetic to religion, having been raised to be a good Tibetan Buddhist. Ana disapproved of what Maria had done, and worried aloud for the salvation of our souls. Of course once Maria's taken a position, there's no such thing as legitimate opposition, least of all from her little sister. Leaping instantly beyond the limits of her non-existent sense of restraint, she gave Ana a piece of her own mind.

Recollecting this event, I'm visited by a vision of Maria facing off against Preacher Lady. Maria could be my role model. I sit back, allowing the notion to entertain me.

It's the match of the century. The only analogy would be Muhammad Ali versus Sonny Liston. Maria versus Preacher Lady, fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world. My father-in-law Jimmy was a boxer in his younger days, known as "Smilin' Jim" for his habit of taunting the other fellow with a tight smile as he danced around the ring evading punches. Maria has it in her blood. Her Dad taught her how to punch when she was little, and she grew up to be a happy puncher, especially fond of responding with a quick, solid jab to the kisser when some boy tossed a sexual remark in her direction.

Maria is Ali -- "She's going to dance; she's going to dance."

Preacher Lady is Liston, "the Bear," criminal-connected, malevolent, nursing a grudge against everyone, a big, heavy Sun Goddess, lording it over the ring. Hunter Thompson is back from the other side, looking jaunty in a fedora with a press tag stuck in the brim, capturing the insanity of it all.

At the weigh-in before the fight, Maria is thrusting her taped hands out in threatening Tibetan mudras, taunting Preacher Lady with a string of crazy faces borrowed from a crew of African sorcerers emerging from a mud hut, high on ibogaine. I back her up with some inane patter: "Riding the bus all the way from New York. They laughed at our painted bus. All across the country they laughed at us. It's all we had. That's what she had. But all the poor peoples is happy!" Then we finish the rap together with the signature line -- "FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY AND STING LIKE A BEE! -- RAHHHH! RAHHHH!"

Weighing in at a hefty one-ninety, Preacher Lady is a big, confident, thug with fists like cast-iron skillets and a eighty-five-inch reach. Her daddy taught her how to take a beating, and ever since, she's been teachin' the gospel of pain to a submissive world. Her title fight was the whippin' she gave Chiropractic Bob. A seventh-round knock-out punch left the toes of his boots neatly pointed at the ceiling. Tonawanda, that giant, might have been her peer. Nobody else.

Maria's channelin' prophecy -- "I predict that tonight somebody will die at ringside from shock!"

Background chatter at the weigh-in fades away into an undertone of numerical chanting -- "twenty-five hundred dollars ... thirty-three-to-one ... take the bet? ... you on... next ..."

Maria's professin' the truth -- "I'm for real, man. I don't get hit. I'm the fastest thing on two feet. Are you crazy?"

Preacher Lady growls back -- "How would you like to find out how good my right is?

Maria's talkin' to the mirror -- "I'm young, I'm purty, I'm fast, I'm handsome, and can't possibly be beat."

"But you won't be after I finish with you," answers Preacher Lady.

Maria answers the critics -- "People say I'm cocky. Some say I need a good whuppin'. Some say I talk too much. But anything that I say I'm willing to back up."

With people giving her thirty-three-to-one odds, Preacher Lady doesn't have to respond to such foolishness. She'll let her fists do the talking. Meanwhile, Maria couldn't buy the benefit of a doubt. If a bookie could give odds on zero, he'd give 'em to her.

Maria picks at Preacher Lady's silence like a scab -- "I'm ready to go to war right now. I'll beat you like I was your daddy. You're too ugly to be the world's champ. The world's champ should be somebody purty, like me. I'm not only a fighter. I'm a poet. I'm a prophet. I'm the resurrector. I'm the saviour of the boxing world. If it wasn't for me, the game would be dead."

Tormented, Preacher Lady descends from her citadel of disdain to blurt -- "You don't have a chance in hell."

Maria jabs back -- "I'm going to beat you so bad you'll think you robbed a bank."

Briefly inspired to some semblance of wit, Preacher Lady answers, "Come over here and sit on my knee and finish your orange juice," topping off her bon mot with a menacing glare that utterly fails to imbue Maria with the fear of God.

Switching to the universal language of holidays, Maria toasts her foe -- "I'm going to wish you a Happy New Year right now, because you're going to need happiness after I annihilate you."

Clothing herself in hell's own wardrobe, Preacher Lady retorts: "In the films the good girl always wins, but this is one bad girl who ain't gonna lose." ------------------

Preacher Lady walks into the ring wearing her short, white terry-cloth robe, ready to get her gloves laced on. Maria bounces out of the dressing room across the arena wearing her short terry-cloth robe, climbing the stairs into the ring. Boos ring out as she does. Not the crowd favorite.

The reigning heavyweight champ, Preacher Lady, is very popular here in the Old Pueblo. Really popular.

Maria, from New York, in white shorts, weighing in at one-eighty-two, has made a career of decking the boys with a lightning right cross that comes straight from the shoulder like a line drive across the pitcher's mound. She smiles when she throws it, and fancies that her grand-dad is watching from somewhere above the lights, approving the sportsmanlike onslaught.

Round one is about to start. We're waiting for the bell.

Ding.

Maria punches twice, Preacher Lady ducks. Maria punches another couple of times. Preacher Lady steps back further, then moves forward, throwing one of those skillets at Maria's face. Maria steps back. They dance. Preacher Lady hugs Maria like the bear she is. They separate and dance again. Maria stays in the center, controlling the ring like a queen. Preacher Lady stretches out, trying to land a punch, and Maria jumps back, leaving her punching air. Preacher Lady swerves her flailing skillet back towards Maria's right ear. Miss. More flailing, more misses, as Maria keeps dancing away. Preacher Lady throws another strong left to Maria's head, then two more, and Maria lets them slide past her like a graffiti artist dodging a fast-moving train in a freightyard. Maria grabs Preacher Lady's head and pushes it down. Preacher Lady throws a six-pack of punches to Maria's head -- pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop -- one on top of the other. Preacher Lady wouldn't throw this fight for all the bubble gum in Bazookaville. She plays to win.

Preacher Lady has a left like Henry's hammer, a right like Betty Bamalam, there's dynamite in both her hands.

Maria is a swashbuckler with color and flash; her punches are smooth like pistol-shots from a gun with a solid frame.

Boom bam
Like the slammer door
The bell and the can
And the body on the floor
Maria's fist flew straight for the head
And Preacher Lady went down like lead

"Get up and fight, sucker," Maria screams. She raises her fists above her head, the new heavyweight champion of the world.

The only thing she can't do is top her past hyperbole. But she tries. "I done wrassled with an alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightnin' and threw thunder in jail. That's bad. I murdered a rock into the stone, hospitalized a brick. I'm so mean, I make medicine sick. I showed you how great I am."

The grand poobahs of the sweet science discussed the genesis of Preacher Lady's fall.

"Preacher Lady didn't know what to expect. What came into play there is tough girls are afraid of the girls who are a little goofy, the girls who fly over the cuckoo's nest. Those kind of girls. Tough girls don't know where to go with that. And she was a tough girl, Preacher Lady. So the Preacher Lady's kind of looking at Maria like this, and Maria's screaming and hollering."

There'd been method in her madness, Maria explained. "Anyone would have to be afraid of a crazy girl, and that's why I was acting crazy."

She'd faked it 'til she made it. "I was indeed scared of Preacher Lady. I had to convince myself I was The Greatest before I could convince the world."

Preacher Lady's last words before going home were: "It's all part of God's plan."

***

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

The initial sense of relief triggered by Preacher Lady's departure was followed by a strained silence. Chiropractic Jane was very quiet as she took me off the stretching machine and directed me to lie down on the massage table. Even her touch was quiet. Preacher Lady had left a ghostly presence in the room that Jane didn't want to mention.

As I was leaving, I said to Chiropractic Jane: "That woman is going to convert you yet -- when you come over on Saturday for Meat, Beer and Bible." Jane shook her head vigorously, and quietly mouthed "No, she's not." I said I was glad that my husband and I no longer had a public law office, with a telephone, where random people could come, or call, and importune us with their life story. She was a little confused, and didn't know why people would call and do that to us, but when I reminded her that it was a law office, she understood.

Then I commented that Preacher Lady had really been very pushy. Again, she looked surprised. What the hell, I thought, had Jane slept through that preview of the apocalypse? Had she experienced it only subconsciously, without conscious involvement? Or did commercial prudence dictate that the customer could never be insane?

I wanted to tell her all the things I'd been thinking while I was on the stretching machine, and what I would have done if I hadn't been restrained by politeness, the politeness that Preacher Lady abuses. And I was even thinking of adding that if she didn't counsel that woman to leave her religion in the parking lot, I could find another chiropractor with a clearer sense of -- what do they call it these days? -- boundaries. But mainly I wanted to ask her what would have happened if I HAD started talking about the absurdity of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and all religions, a topic on which I can wax eloquent. Would I be silenced as a boorish, insensitive radical?

So it was a lost opportunity. You have to go around with your intellectual armor in place in this world, like Muhammad Ali makin' magic by predicting victory and backin' it up.

Repeat after me:

Daddy's going down
For miles and miles
Daddy's going down
For miles and miles

Thank you.

With acknowledgements to Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston, Mark Knopfler, and my editor, Charles Carreon