Novel

Saturday, February 26

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Retired Air Force Buck Sergeant Art Brew analyzed Operation Iraqi Freedom® for YU News Service, a parody news and disinformation syndicate, of which he was Miami Bureau Chief.

Well, Brew wasn't retired. He had been reverted to his permanent rank. Yardbird.

A yardbird is a buck private, the lowest enlisted rank. "Bucking for private." A yardbird polices the parade grounds picking up cigarette butts like a chicken pecking shit in a barnyard.

Brew had been recalled to active duty and assigned to the throw-down squad.

A throw-down weapon is a Saturday Night Special a police officer "throws down" on an unarmed suspect he has killed, to show that he was attacked by an armed assailant resisting arrest. The throw-down weapon in Iraq would be the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) United Nations inspectors failed to find and Saddam Hussein has so far failed to use against the American invaders and their Coalition of the Willing (COW) allies.

COW is almost as stupid an acronym as Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP), with which it bears many similarities. CREEP still resonated of Watergate, Nixon's resignation, Kissinger's secret bombing of Cambodia, to Brew. Not to mention smear campaigns, dirty tricks, an enemies list, subornation of perjury The whole "black bag" bag of off-the-books, or plausibly deniable, activities.

Operation Iraqi Freedom® reminded Brew of Irangate, too. Maybe because lots of the convicted Irangate felons had been pardoned by President Bush's father and now held high positions in President Bush's leadership cadre, or team.

Maybe the COW wouldn't have to throw down evidence of WMD, since the entire country was soon going to glow like a radium watch from depleted uranium (DU) rounds.

Really, what Operation Iraqi Freedom® reminded Brew of was the old Al Capp Fearless Fosdick strip where there was one can of poisoned pork-and-beans in a batch of pork-and-beans a food manufacturer had put out, and Fosdick went around shooting every citizen he saw with a can of beans so they wouldn't poison themselves, big cartoon bullet holes through their heads.

I don't remember if the can of beans turned out to be apocryphal, or real, but a lot of citizens died, being protected from the bean-poisoning threat, just as villages were saved by being destroyed in Vietnam and Vietnamese people's hearts and minds were won by shooting them and burying them in a slit trench with quicklime, or napalm.

"Bully of the Town" is a fiddle tune Owen Saunders put on his debut fiddle tape, 12 Gauge Fiddle, one of his uncle Wayne Brown's favorites. Owen gave Uncle Wayne a producing credit on the tape, which surprised Wayne, and made him proud.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--When Brew worked as a technical writer for Suent Scientific, the first thing that came up on his computer monitor when he booted up every morning was a screen called The Diversity Circle. It showed four hands, a black, a yellow, a red, and a white, shaking hands.

Isn't that special. Bless their little hearts.

At his web site, The Daily Bugle, Brew wrote a newsletter, KorporateKulture.Kom (KKK). He wrote a column. "Ask Doktor Dork."

From an early quality control program, Zero Defects, the old NCOs called Zelda Dork.

"We put the K in kwality."

In his newsletter, Brew called the screen The Circle Jerk, and added a fifth hand, a taupe Thalidomide flipper.

A circle jerk is a contest in which teenage boys masturbate to see who can ejaculate, or "come," first. Or ejaculate, or "shoot off," the furthest.

Take that, you slut.

Quality was about excellence and diversity was about, well, reverse discrimination. Quotas.

You couldn't have excellence and outreach both. It was a logical impossibility, like being a team player and a self-starter.

Brew got paranoid and took The Daily Bugle down.

The Homeland über alles Security Czar's anti-terrorism software was especially vigilant in rooting out racism, sexism, and homophobia, ableism, ableism thought it was all right to favor people who were good at something over people who weren't, people who weren't good at anything wanted to be promoted, too, be bossmen, be in charge of people who were better than they were, it was only natural. Why should the better person win?

Or was it Suent Scientific's ideological rectitude software?

Brew couldn't remember.

Brew knew Suent Scientific was death on using the computer at work for racism, gambling, child pornography, weapons, disloyalty, airing dirty linen, why else did management employees have to sign a nondisclosure agreement when they hired on, an intellectual property agreement that said the company owned the very thoughts in their heads, on duty or off, at work or at home, in station or in the field, at peace and at war, we were at war, we were playing keepsies, not funsies, and Brew was messing with primal forces, as New Beatty said in his famous speech in Network.

The old radio show The FBI in Peace and War used a march from Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges as a theme song.

Didn't they know he was a Communist?

Brew wasn't a Communist, he was a canoeist. He wasn't a feuilletonist, he was a balloonist. They weren't real big on people who filled rubbers full of water and threw them out of hotel windows on their 64th Birthday Tour, either. Although Brew's 64th Birthday Tour was a couple of years off, then.

Look out, below.

Dr. Dailey taught a graduate seminar in French structuralism. We read a chapter of Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind, and talked about it in class once a week.

He had been at SUNY, Buffalo, and knew anthropologists across the border at the University of Toronto, where Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan were putting out the journal Explorations in Communication.

Once he hired Brew as a lab assistant and gave him the job of preparing some skulls that had been dug up at St. Marks, at the fort, San Marcos de Apalache, Andy Jackson's Hessian mercenaries, so he could examine them, measure them, and compare them to the skulls of Caucasian and American Indian populations of the same time period (Second Seminole War). They had been immersed in brine--that is, their graves were below the water table, and salt water had intruded--and the brains were preserved inside the crania, although there was no flesh on the rest of the skeletons. Some of the long bones, and some of the skulls, showed evidence of healed fractures. These troopers did not live an easy life. Dr. Dailey thought they were young, too, most of them.

Brew went in through the foramen magnum with an iced tea spoon and scooped the tissue out.

When the spoon point broke the integument, a sickly sweet odor rushed into the lab, an ill wind heaving into sight, or smell. Eerie.

On a dig Dr. Dailey went on, with Chief, and Brew and Brenda, and Kevin, he had a styrofoam boogie board, and Brew asked him if he was going to hang nine.

He had shot one big toe off in a hunting accident.

Dr. Daily made a joke on that dig.

There was a women's bay area, and a men's bay area, with bunk beds, for sleeping, but they all used the same shower, and commode.

At supper one night, Dr. Dailey said, "Whoever has short, curly black hair is clogging up the shower drain."

Ha ha, he meant pubic hair, which everybody had.

Brew made a joke on that dig, too.

When Brenda iced the carrot cake, one of the coeds said, "Mommy, Mommy, can I lick the bowl?" and Brew said, "Shut up and flush it."

You don't get a chance to use a joke like that every day.

Dr. Dailey was dead and Brew missed him.

When he died, Brew was working as a laborer, drummed out of the accelerated PhD program at Tulane because the faculty thought he could show improvement, on his written exams, but would not tell him how much improvement, in which areas, and Brew correctly guessed that whatever it was, he would not achieve it. That's when he gave himself a DIY grant and started writing. Stole the last year of his fellowship and called himself a DIY fellow.

Do-it-yourself.