McCain Scrutiny

There's an excellent piece by Frank Rich in today's NYTimes, on John McCain and what a tool he is (I'd post a link, but I lack the skillz). Check it out.

Which reminded me of a little bit of McCain history that he's been getting a free pass on from the media...you might even remember it.

The time he called his wife a cunt in public.

Yes, that's right, the old POW hero actually lost it with his (much younger, much richer) spouse so badly as to viciously snap at her the worst, most offensive word anyone can use to a woman.

Leaving aside why we use physiological words as snarling epithets (prick, cunt, cocksucker...), which is a blog unto itself, I have to say I am really interested in the dynamics of this incident, and in what it says about McCain, whom I hate with the fire of a thousand burning suns. Nay, a million.

Here's a piece I found online, about a related incident from May 2008:

A man attending a McCain event as a registered member of the press was kicked out of the Des Moines town hall meeting for asking a question that working press should have asked him weeks ago: Did you call your wife a "cunt"?

The headline is typical of the kid glove treatment McCain gets from the media. McCain didn't "field the question" he kicked a member of the press out of his town hall meeting for asking a question:


McCain fields audience question on whether he called wife an expletive


REGISTER STAFF • May 1, 2008


A Clive man drew gasps from fellow audience members at today’s presidential candidate forum by using a four-letter word in a question to Sen. John McCain.


A member of the audience, identified as Marty Parrish of Clive, asked McCain during the event at the Polk County Convention Complex about a rumor that McCain had once used a profane word referencing female genitalia to describe his wife.


A book, “The Real McCain” by Cliff Schecter, accuses McCain of using the word in an exchange with his wife, Cindy, in 1992.


Here’s a transcript of today’s remarks:


PARRISH: This question goes to mental health and mental health care. Previously, I’ve been married to a woman that was verbally abusive to me. Is it true that you called your wife a (expletive)?


MCCAIN: Now, now. You don’t want to … Um, you know that’s the great thing about town hall meetings, sir, but we really don’t, there’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language. So I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.


The audience gasped at the question and applauded at McCain’s handling of it. Parrish was escorted from the event and questioned by Secret Service, but not charged. Parrish had checked in to the event as a member of the press.



Parrish, a 45-year-old Baptist minister and technology business owner, said he attended the event specifically to confront McCain about the rumor.


“This is about character,” Parrish said, when reached by telephone afterward. “And in a moment of intemperance, he called his wife the most despicable name a person can call a woman.

Notice McCain didn't have the guts to answer the question. The word "no" was not, last I checked, considered profane even in Des Moines.

It's not like the McCain campaign has a policy of not responding to the cunt allegation. McCain had his spokeswoman accuse Schecter of fabrication in the New York Daily News when the Scheter's book came out:


McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker brands the book "trash journalism" and tells us, "The story is completely fabricated." [NYDN]

McCain was implicitly warning the rest of the media not to ask him questions that make him mad.

Takes a big man to send out your spokesman to defame an author and kick a preacher/citizen journalist out of your town hall meeting.

McCain is a petty little coward whose toadies are crying "ambush" for a question about an allegation that was published over three weeks ago, addressed by a campaign spokeswoman, and discussed extensively in the media and online.

This is exactly the kind of bullying that lends further credence to Cliff Schecter's account and the many other examples of McCain's peevishness, intimidation, and rage he chronicles in his book, The Real McCain.



Man! This guy is dangerously unstable. Not to mention a misogynistic beast. Can you imagine the repercussions if he used the same word against a female head of state he disagreed with? I'd love to have seen him pull that on Margaret Thatcher or Benazir Bhutto...they'd have had his nuts for earrings, and rightly so.

But the larger horror remains. He called his own wife a cunt. The context was as follows: she had been teasing him for his hair getting a bit thin in the thatch, maybe a tad bit cruel, okay. And then he comes back with "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Nice! And despite the above story claiming that this was discussed "extensively" in the media, I didn't see it. And I read a LOT.

So where oh where is the journalistic outrage, the outcry of the citizens? Quashed, nonexistent. Muffled at best.

This should have been plastered across college newspapers coast to coast. And regular journalistic outlets as well. Any man who could lose his temper so far as to call his own wife a vile name in public is not a man to be trusted on any level.

He's no statesman: he blatantly lies about his own voting record, and he still cravenly supports the now utterly disconnected (possibly even clinically so) Chimpy (yea, verily, even on that horrible piece of legislation about denying children, CHILDREN!, an extension of health care benefits that would have cost about an hour of his private little war). McCain's a piece of feculent vermin, the cloaca of iniquity.

And I want to see him trodden underfoot in November. I want to see the Boot of Karma, the Foot of Pride, come down on him and squish him into the dirt like the utter cockroach that he is.

That's all.

Spring Running

It's a strange thing, but the first week of May, right on up to around the 12th or 15th or so, has always been unusually evocative for me.

It isn't necessarily even connected with some major event, like Jim proposing, which of course put a mythic longing and achingly reminiscent spin on the first week of May forever. Could just be a cool, windy, rainy day, with the new ridiculously green leaves and the white blossoms on the pear trees all flying.

But there's something about the quality of the air, and the way it smells and feels, as it transitions from one season to the next, that just sandbags me, buckles my knees, the freshness of it, and the light, that gets me every time. Makes me want to weep, and also exalts me clean out of myself.

Even when I was a kid. As some of you may have noticed from reading my books, I'm a big fan of weather and seasons. Right up there with jewelry and hair. And it isn't just spring that can haunt me right there in the middle of itself.

Autumn does the same, even better; and winter, only different of course. It's only summer that doesn't grab me the same way, mainly because I hate the heat and humidity. But even summer can do it: an afternoon with a thunderstorm on the way, everything all hot and thick and waiting, the leaves are so thick and green they smell like milk. And then when the storm finally hits, the gaspingness of it, the smell of the rain on hot stone pavement or roads, the wind that's like a slap in the face.

But these few middle weeks of spring are to me the most poignant, damn near unbearable, as they change and slip away for another year. And I just felt like talking about it.



(I hope at least one or two fellow Kipling fans caught the title...)

Block Island

Well, it's not BLOCK, exactly. It's just that I'm having a really, reeeeeeally hard time with "California Screamin': Murder at Monterey Pop." If, indeed, I can say that about a book that's already 80,000 words long.

I'm very, very happy with the characters and what they're doing/how they're growing; that part's easy. But the mystery part...giving me unbelievable trouble! And I don't know why.

I have NEVER had such problems with a book before, and perhaps, after publishing ten, and writing at least as many again (a huge, annotated book about Jim, me and spirituality which will probably never be published; a kid's book that my editor deemed too sophisticated for kids and not meaty enough for YA, but would have been illustrated by Tom Canty; the Viking book; plus all the Rennie ones currently in various stages of completion), I guess maybe I was due for a rough patch. My books have all come so INCREDIBLY easily, always, that I just figured a book of mine always would...

And this one too. Until now.

Admittedly, the murders are fairly complex this time, with a veritable fishmonger's stall of red herrings. Without giving too much away, the murderees and murderers are deeply intertwined and interconnected, and hopefully you won't guess First Murderer until the big reveal at the end. But maybe you will. And I'm still stuck on how Second Murderer is discovered. And Third Murderer.

The rest of the book I'm really proud of. There's some very nice music writing, if I do say so myself, about the Festival itself: the actual, real bands as well as the big breakthrough appearances of Turk, Prax and Tansy, and the local color. Plus the growth of Rennie as a person, and some cameos by people like Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia, and some new characters I'm very pleased with and hope you will be too.

Alas, it won't be out in June, as I in my traha had recklessly boasted. But since the third book is done, I still hope to have both of them out this year.

It's the figuring out the denouement of the mystery angle and the reveals that has me all knotted up. But, tempting though it is to use the Gordian Plot Device ("And then the sun went nova and everybody died! The End."), I'll make them bend to my will yet. You'll see.

And, by Gwydion, god of writers, and Kwang Gung, god of war and literature, so will they.

Potato, Potahto...

I have been following, with horror of several different sorts, the story of the cyclone disaster in Burma. First off, the appalling loss of life and property, and the equally appalling backwardness of the government in not allowing foreign aid workers in. Though when Shrub starts stuttering about US Navy warships standing off the coast willing to "help" I can sort of see why they want no part of it.

But yes, that's right, I said Burma. I absolutely refuse to call that poor sad lovely country by the name given it by the bunch of repressive thugs that run it.

In this, I take my cue from the Times of London, which calls it Burma loudly and proudly in all its coverage, and I want to smack all the newspapers and TV and radio stations in this country who cravenly cave in and call it by the unattractive, thug-conferred moniker of "Myanmar."

You'd think that since our own government is so allegedly opposed to the ruling junta, they wouldn't accept the imposed name. And yet they do. Go figure. While all the exile organizations and exiles I've seen in print and on TV unambiguously call their land Burma. They should know what its true name is...

Hey! BURMA BURMA BURMA BURMA BURMA! So much more evocative...can you imagine Kipling writing "There's a Myanmar girl a-sittin'" by that old Moulmein pagoda while the dawn comes up like thunder out of...what, Vietnam 'cross the bay? No, you can't. At least I can't.

I dislike being so railroaded. Which is also why I don't cotton to the damn Pinyin system of Chinese transliteration. Why in the name of hot horse-apples must we use the unlovely and unpronounceable romanizations such as Xi and Qi?

I don't know about you, but when I see Xi and Qi and Qan I say Zee and Kwee and Kwan. If the Chinese want us to say Shi and Chi and Chwan, then they should damn well let us spell them like that. It makes no difference anyway, since it's different letters and different alphabets, so why not go for the simplest orthographical solutions?

Again, a bunch of stubborn, repressive, ingrown, sullen thugs. Let 'em eat lo mein. As long as they don't start trying to spell it differently.

And Then He Kissed Me

But first he asked me to marry him. On a lovely spring afternoon in Central Park, under a flowering pear tree, on a grassy lawn the color of the emerald he gave me.

Thirty-eight years ago today. And it seems like...today.

I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet

Well, thank heavens, I do not, though I have in the past, but one of my MySpace friends, Princess of Chaos, did, in Illinois the other day, and (by her gracious permission) here's her report:

Just wanted to drop ya a note and tell you I was thinking of you early this morning when the earthquake rumbled here through Illinois. A 5 point something, enough to be felt here in Chicago and even up in Wisconsin too!

A couple observations I wanted to share...

My cat, Felix, who usually wakes me up to demand breakfast around 5:30, was acting up about 4:15. He was pouncing on me, jumping from my pillows to me, pillows to me, and then decided to fling his toy mouse at me while acting like a mad cat. Then he collected 3 of his favorite toys and put them next to me on the bed and continued to jump and meow and flop onto me. I kept rebuffing his attentions, pulling covers higher. Then he dove under my pillows up by my head and huddled with me and then... shake, shake, shake---the quake happened---things rattled and vibrated, etc. I sat up, looked around and said "Oh, Felix, go back to sleep. it's just an earthquake."

He stayed by me the rest of the morning...he NEVER sleeps by me in bed, he has his own little sleeping area away from "human activity". I calmly went back to sleep. Earthquakes are not a huge problem here in Chicago, so obviously a few seconds of shaking didn't rouse me to any action or alarm.

BUT...the cool thing...before I nodded off again I thought of you and "Strange Days", when you "predicted it", and wondered if you had any earthquake feelings or thoughts yesterday? Then I promptly fell back asleep for a few hours.

So two things:

1) My cat...do you think he was trying to "warn" me - his atypical behaviour being some sort of caveat to me? Or perhaps he just was scared? Or both? I remember you said in "Strange Days" the horses were skittish the day before, and I have heard stories of animals fleeing before storms, etc...

2) Last night before bed I had a weird headache and just felt weird, like something was "wrong" and I was restless and didn't want to sleep. The "E" word didn't come to me, but do you think I may have felt something was to happen but didn't know exactly what



Wow! Well, y'all have probably heard about this quake by now. It was a 5.4 or 5.2, not huge but certainly big enough to take note of, epicenter in southern Illinois, on the Wabash Extension of the New Madrid Fault.

That it was on the New Madrid line REALLY interests me, in a grim sort of way. New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid, not ma-DRID), in Missouri, had a series of monster quakes back in 1811 and 1812. They were so huge that they were felt in Boston, and they changed the course of the Mississippi River. The biggest quakes east of the Rockies, and still hold that record.

"But, Patricia," you seismologically cognizant little devils protest, "but that area of the continent isn't REMOTELY near a plate subduction zone, like California, Alaska and the rest of the Pacific "Ring of Fire" quake areas. Why then such big quakes?"

The prevailing tectonic thinking is two-fold: first, it might be that the Farallon Plate, subducting under California (means sinking down under another plate, in this case the North American one), has by now reached the center of the continental plate, 3-6 miles down under the Midwest, and is causing the shakes.

Second, that there is a giant geological rift running through that area, like a crack in the basement of the continent, and it wants to split apart. And when it twitches, the quakes happen.

Or a combination of the two causes. But, either way, the New Madrid Fault could let go again, big time, and it could happen a thousand years from now, or it could happen tomorrow. There's no way of knowing, since there are few if any monitors and sensors set up there, unlike Hawaii or California.

The reason quakes along that fault (or along faults in the East) are felt over such a wide distance is because the rock structure in the Midwest and East is old, cold, stiff and unbroken. Whereas in California and Alaska, the rocks are newer and more pliable, so the quake energy doesn't travel as far.

As to the Princess's account, for starters, her kitty TOTALLY knew a quake was coming, and I bet she did too, hence her vague feelings of unease.

It really is a great disturbance in the Force: the electromagnetic field, at any rate. And animals, who are far more keenly attuned to the EMF than humans, sense it hours, even days, ahead.

And certainly right before it happens: before the huge quake that caused the Indonesian tsunami back in 2004, wild and working elephants alike headed up into the hills away from the beaches, hours before, and if people had been smart they would have gone along. Other critters too were reported to have behaved similarly: snakes, monkeys, dogs, cats. Follow the animals, people! They know!

Before the Sylmar quake, near LA, in 1971, the only really big quake I've ever been in (6.7 to 7.1, estimated), the horses we'd gone out to that valley to ride the day before did indeed behave in premonitory fashion, clustering together in the far field, not wanting to come to us, just acting strangely enough for me to start babbling about earthquakes. And about 15 hours later, there one was...

But sometimes humans can pick up on it too, from the unease that the Princess describes to full-fledged knowledge. I have a bit of it myself, as she mentions, and as other readers of "Strange Days" will perhaps recall: it manifests as a kind of general light nausea, like morning sickness, a vague disquiet, and a compulsive urge to talk nonstop about earthquakes, or even read books about them.

It doesn't always happen---usually only for really big quakes or for very local ones (happened in LA twice, once in Bolton, England!, couple of times here in NYC, even). (Oh yes, we have quakes here! There's active faults under the city, up the Hudson Valley---under the nuclear facility at Indian Point, even, built there by a friend's engineer brother, in fact---and all the way up the Northeast, from New Jersey to Canada).

But when it does there's ALWAYS a quake within 24 hours.

Many years ago I was following the activities of a group of fellow Mensa members, "earthquake dowsers" far more skilled and sensitive than I. These people were registered with the National Earthquake Registry or whatever it was called then, in Golden, Colorado, and when they felt something building up, they'd call in with their predictions.

Some of them were SO good they could dowse locations and Richter-scale intensity off maps, and tell you when, where and how big. And their accuracy rate was amazing.

There was also a woman, I'm not sure if she was part of that group, but she was filmed for a documentary on Mt. St. Helens, a few years after the big blow of 1980. Not only had she predicted that catastrophic eruption, but WHILE BEING FILMED, she broke off to say that she sensed another quake/eruption at the mountain happening right that moment, and when they called the observatory and time-checked her, she was absolutely right, to the second.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much point to such foreknowledge. Sure, predictions probably saved a lot of people in a big China earthquake a while back: the local authorities believed the prediction, made everybody move out of their buildings, and mere hours later, boom, along came a monster shake that could have killed hundreds of thousands but didn't, thanks to the prediction.

But this wouldn't really work for, say, L.A. or San Francisco. Where would people evacuate TO, for one thing? Eight million people out in the desert isn't gonna happen, and besides, the San Andreas, which is going to blow in Southern California pretty soon now, being almost a hundred years overdue (and the recent big quakes on nearby faults like the ones near Big Bear aren't relieving the pressure), runs right through there anyway.

So it's a conundrum. I just hope I don't pick up on any such feelings anytime soon.

Pope-A-Dope (Or, Pontiff-icating)

I couldn't escape it. It was all over the tube today. All Pope, all the time...infesting my city like a white-robed virus, clogging the airwaves and the streets alike.

So, on the principle of Know Thine Enemy (as Jedi to Sith), I watched for a bit. Well, more than a bit. And I was appalled.

First off, I was made physically and spiritually ill by the sight of scores, if not hundreds, of old, white, skirt-wearing males. I started keeping track after a while, and I saw exactly TWO women all afternoon, one a child, one a grownup, in "official" capacities connected with Palpatine.

The child was a teenaged Jewish girl who presented him with a copy of the Haggadah when he made his much ballyhooed appearance at an uptown synagogue; the other was a reader at the "ecumenical" prayer service that followed at a more uptown Catholic church. Wow. Way to show how you feel about women, von Ratz!

Then there was the whole synagogue appearance carnival. Fine, he wants to reconcile with Jews, excellent! BUT how do WE reconcile the fact that not that long ago he restored that vile Latin prayer in the Tridentine liturgy that prays for the Jews to be converted as a people to Christianity?

So, it's okay to hang out at a synagogue for half an hour or so and accept the gift of a Seder plate, the Haggadah and some matzoth, but you still believe the Jews are wrong and ill-informed and you PRAY FOR them to no longer be a religion but just another bunch of converted Christians. MAN, does that steam me! And I'm not really happy with the craven rabbis, apparently merely anxious to make public relations history, who didn't protest this, either.

Oh, and "ecumenical" prayer service? Sure, there were a bunch of Armenian and Orthodox prelates there, plus a lot of fat, greasy-looking, greasy-hearted Evangelicals (don't blame me, that's what they looked like, Southern used-car salesmen...). But I saw NOT ONE WOMAN AMONG THEM. Not even a nun. The only woman who went up to be presented was the Rev. Bernice King, estimable daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, may their names live in glory evermore. That was it.

And it'll be a cold day in Hitler Youth Hell before my own faith gets an apology out of the Vatican for killing hundreds of thousands of us, and as many utterly innocent women just for being women. I doubt I'll be sharing the quaich with a pope at a Samhain celebration anytime soon. Unless it's Pope Eve Mary I, and I don't think she's coming down the pike, not in this millennium anyway...

Watching the priestlings and the smug, smarmy cardinals surrounding Ratz like cassocked and biretta'd remoras, I wonder how anyone (and there were dozens, all crowding the camera for their TV moment) can still buy into this charade.

Even the trumpeted "private" interview with sex abuse survivors from the Boston area: I was not there, obviously, but from what was said, he basically just said ooh so sorry and yes we must do better. Well, big whoop, Benny! How about some REAL contrition, not just lip service? He's sorrier that the church has had to pay out 2 billion bucks in reparation and fines than that it was all covered up in the first place.

IT'S A SIN, pope boy! How could you even THINK that the God you profess to love and serve would be pleased that you basically ignored the whole thing (or your predecessor did, even more so, may he rot in the hell he believes in) and just shuffled off the pederast predators to new dioceses where they could prey upon new innocents? You make Jesus cry! Or maybe just get out the whip he used on the moneychangers...

Tell you what: I'd like to bring back the repentance ceremonies of King Henry II of England. You know, the one where, having been found implicitly responsible for the murder of Thomas Becket, he was publicly flogged in Canterbury Cathedral and had to do all sorts of penances. Yeah. I think that might be a REAL deterrent. For priests and popes alike.