[Nascar Politicians, cheeseburgers for Darfur, how our own soldiers enslave us, what is evolution good for?; and an excerpt about talking plants from Rich Zubaty's novel: Your Brain Is Not Your Own. ]
This is Rich Zubaty, The Rude Guy, the Paul Harvey of podcasting, welcoming you to the Reality Cult, inviting you to listen to “the REST of the story”. This is the podcast that’s about ideas, not issues, not opinions. Ideas.
HERE’s an idea I got off the net. Nascar politicians. You know how race car drivers wear patches from their sponsors… Bardohl and STP and Prestone anti-freeze? Well, what we do is, we pass a law that says ALL our politicians, MUST wear sport coats with patches, identifying their corporate sponsors. Get it? Nascar politicians. That way Dick Cheney would be sporting Halliburton and Exxon/Mobil patches, every time he went on Larry King Live or Bill O’Reilly. That way we could see for ourselves who’s REALLY doin the talking here. Joe Lieberman would be plastered with Hartford and Aetna and other insurance companies. Hilary Clinton would be decaled with feminist organizations, Wall Street Brokerage houses, and other Jewish clubs. And why not Larry King himself. Sticker him up with car companies, and junk food, and purple stomach-acid pills. He gives ME stomach acid with his dumb ass, celebrity suck-off, interviews. He hasn’t had a new and rising talent on his show EVER. Only people neck deep in tragedy, or the primetime warriors, who are being buffeted in the trade winds of gossip, for making some stupid blunder.
Nascar politicians. A simple, powerful idea. Let’s see who sponsors these politicians, and media personalities, EVERY time they get on camera. Let the world know who’s buying the government, and media, of the United States of America.
Here’s another idea: multinational, two for one, cheeseburgers. Got this idea from a friend on Maui. Calls himself Dr. Leisure, and claims to be “compulsively laid back.” At least that’s what’s carved on the ass end of his pickup truck. He built a wooden cabin on the back of his truck, decorated it with deer antlers picked up at Makena Beach State Park… where he’s trying to stop the rich people’s condo development, right next door to one of the last remaining nude beaches in Hawaii. So long Little Beach, if Everett Dowling keeps bribing the Maui County Council to build his preposterous developments.
Dr. Leisure’s a good soul, who’s shown me the ropes about living in my truck. What to avoid, where to get free food, and take a crap… important stuff to know. You can visit his Dr. Leisure web site, to find out more about Makena, and other, nude beaches. d-r-leisure dot com.
Anyway, his two for one burgers idea goes like this. You buy a burger at MacDonalds, or a pizza, at Pizza Hut, and they give away a FREE one in Darfur, Sudan or Afghanistan or Pakistan, or anywhere else people are starving. How about it? I’d go for that. I’d pay 50 cents more for a burger if I knew I was DIRECTly helping to feed somebody. A promotional program like that could change the face of global capitalism. Two for one burgers.
And here’s a corollary idea. We all know the government is run by corporations. But what if the corporations who bought our politicians were General Foods and General Mills, instead of General Dynamics and General Electric? Food companies, instead of military hardware companies. In other words, what if we spent our tax money, wildly and irresponsibly, on food… not bombs? What if, instead of spending a trillion dollars on the Iraq war, we spent it on food, and gave it away all over the world. You know what would happen? People would LOVE Americans. Terrorism would go away. The local people all over the planet would turn in terrorists and say: I thought my baby was gonna die, but the Americans sent us food. So I don’t want any more terrorists attacking America.” Can you truly imagine how much difference food, not bombs, would make? Stupendous.
Here’s another idea: Our soldiers do not keep us free, they keep us enslaved. Despite the cheap blandishments, shoveled at us by left wing warblers – just BEFORE they tell us we should get out of Iraq — our soldiers do NOT keep us free. They keep us enslaved. Enslaved to a military industrial state, that profiteers from war… and enslaves us to crippling debt, and living in crumbling cities, and toiling at low-paying jobs… and borrows money off OUR credit card, and sticks our children with the bill. Our soldiers do not keep us free, they keep us enslaved. Fuck propaganda. Fuck being nice. Yeah, I feel sorry for the guys who fought. But they need to wake the fuck up. And so do the rest of us. They were wrong. Since the end of World War Two, they fought and died for nothing, except corporate profit. Until we, as a nation, truly understand — that we are enslaved by our OWN soldiers, and our corporate military, and the vast sums of OUR money they consume – we have NO chance of making this country work again. Our money is stolen from us before we even earn it. We spend as much money on our military, as the entire rest of the world combined. It’s INSANE. Our soldiers have to stop fighting. And we have to refuse to pay for all this corporate welfare and tax payer waste. For the first half of the 1900s, America PRIDED itself on having the largest country, with the smallest comparable army, anywhere in the world. But that all ended in 1945. We’ve never stopped fighting Word War Two. Wake up. It’s over. Hitler’s gone, the communists are gone, the terrorists are just the newest red flag they’re waving in our faces. Terrorists will be stopped by police men, not army men. We can’t afford these MILITARIST BASTARDS, and their criminal waste, any longer.
OK… Enough… I could run with that for an hour… And already have. on other shows. But I’m trying to sell books. Good books. My books. So today I’m gonna read an excerpt from my novel, Your Brain Is Not Your Own. A novel about ideas, not feelings. Precisely what’s missing in our modern media world. I-DE-AS.
Ideas like: what is evolution good for? What is evolution good for? In other words, if someone scientifically disproved the theory of evolution tomorrow, how would our lives change? Would we cook food differently? Start our cars differently. Take a different road to work? No. Nothing would change. Nothing at all except what they put in our kid’s schoolbooks. Evolution is useless, except, maybe, for bashing religion. And that agenda has run its course. The true fact is, there’s more fundamental human value to be found in any child’s, Sunday School, PRAYer book, than in ALL the books written about evolution. So dinosaurs were once birds. Who gives a fuck? Terrorists were once prayerful Muslims, until the U.S. Air Force bombed their villages and killed their kids. We need to learn a lot more about the causes of terrorism, and a lot less about what causes duck bills and webbed feet. What the fuck. Our priorities are insane.
You know, don’t you, that the REASON Osama bombed us, was to get OUR SOLDIERS, out of HIS country, so he and his friends can pull DOWN the Saudi royalty, and create a different government? They want a revolution against their king. And guess what? That’s none of our business. The only thing that has made it our business is the fact that the Bush Family is close friends with the Saudi Family – both of them, oil families first, and rulers second …
Have you noticed that ever since we invaded Iraq, and pulled our troops out of Saudi Arabia, there have been no more Al Qaeda attacks in the USA. You think Bush did that? Think again. Our soldiers got out of Saudi Arabia, and Osama cooled his jets. Osama stopped the attacks because we got OUR soldiers out of HIS country. Interesting huh? That’s what Paul Harvey calls the “rest of the story”.
OK OK, enough ranting… I’m gonna read from this novel. But it’s hard to jump in and read excerpts from fiction, because you don’t know the characters, or the storyline. Any good book is cumulative, building ideas and personalities from chapter to chapter. So just keep in mind, this is not a stupid book. In fact it’s a very intelligent book. Like Alice in Wonderland, which was written by a mathematician, and was mostly about mathematics. Your Brain Is Not Your Own was written by an idea junkie, and it’s mostly about ideas. Anyway, lemme give you a taste of it.
[gulls/waves]
YEARS LATER, as the pirates shoved him onto the gangplank, Doctor Odysseus Tyme thought back to the day his father told him, plants could talk.
The revelation of consciousness in plants had crashed the hallowed Petri dishes of Biology like a rogue comet – splattering gum agar across the desks and couches of psychologists and social scientists, from Tallahassee to Tokyo – smearing their brainpans with blood nutrients, stimulating the growth of brand new thoughts. They’d made a mess of understanding humans. Why not try plants? They were simpler, more basic – weren’t they?
Almost overnight the media was deluged with pseudo-scientific reports on “Lettuce in Love”, or “I was a Toxically Shamed Geranium”. One could dip, into the mind, of a potato, discoursing on “Arrested Development in Rocky Soil”, or hear why “Real Manure, is the Cure”, by a panel of tulips. It was a whole, new, MINDscape.
Once scientists turned their computer-ears to the most commonly used plant frequencies, they could hold running conversations with any vegetable, moss or tree. “Human Odors and Lunar Cycles” made TIME magazine, as did “The Eco-Advantages of Urinating on Your Bushes”, a fascinating portrayal, of exactly, how lilacs transformed pee, into perfume.
Within months the new research set off an epidemic of suicides among vegetarians. For centuries they had claimed the high moral ground on the assumption that what they ate, did not think or feel. They had based this fantasy, on the idea, that plants didn’t have a central nervous system. But, said the New Science, the spine has to do with locomotion, not thinking or memory. Plants, as it turned out, were suffused with emotion – every cell bathed in an electro-chemical dance of life – JUST like us. In fact, by the time the full truth came out about how plants entertained emotions, and modes of communication, beyond the scope of human sensitivity, it was ALready too late.
Some grant-hungry grad students at the University of Chicago started the uproar in Psycho-Botany when they performed a seemingly bogus experiment on two tanks of brine shrimp. They set the first shrimp tank, in the corner of a dormitory kitchen, and shielded it, with empty egg cartons, to baffle all sound. They placed the second shrimp tank on a table 30 centimeters from the stove, fired up a frying pan with hot oil, and sat around in shifts talking about how they were going to fry up the little brine shrimpies, and eat them in sandwiches, with mayonnaise and onions. Within three days all the shrimp in tank number two, were dead.
The political fallout from this cruel experiment, earned the grad students an appearance before the student tribunal. They were barred from university sponsored social functions, through the influence exerted on the administration by Animal Rights activists, who censured the killers for, “emotional violence to fellow animals”.
No one has ever been able to reproduce the brine shrimp experiment – it was rumored that some drops of carbon tetrachloride, may have found their way into tank number two – and the hoopla might have ended right, there if someone hadn’t noticed that the seaweed in tank number two, had begun taking on some fire-resistant qualities. Very odd properties in an underwater plant.
This discovery was made by Apollo Tyme, Odysseus’ biological father. Late one night, when his girlfriend had kicked him out of her room, because she needed to study for a Sexual Strategy exam, Apollo was having a problem with matches. He’d managed to light his cigarette just fine, lounging near the radiator in a back corner of the kitchen. But as he struggled repeatedly to light the burner under an opened can of spaghetti, which he had artfully balanced on the finger tips of the stove rings, his matches simply would not ignite. He went through a book of matches, swore, spilled the spaghetti all over the stove, and then noticed the body language of the seaweed, hunkering in the tank of dead brine shrimp, 30 cm to his right. The seaweed had organized itself into a replica, of a hook-and-ladder truck, and was emitting some kind of GAS. Apollo dashed upstairs and woke up Punky Epsteeen who was majoring in Molds and Spores.
Apollo never got any credit for his discovery. By the time the reporter from the student newspaper arrived at 11 a.m., he had fallen asleep in a chair near the radiator. Punky filled in some gaps in the story, with a few terse hallucinations and the die was cast. Epsteeen apologized later to Apollo and, to his credit, even offered to retract, some of his hallucinations, but Apollo didn’t care. Epsteeen’s mom had already appeared on national TV, taking all the credit for her son’s genius, and Apollo, majoring in Women’s Studies, couldn’t imagine how his accidental observations, on fire-retardant seaweed, could possibly advance his career. Little did he know.
Within one month some red-eyed, long-haired, U. of C. undergrads, had soldered together an electronic eavesdropping device, tuned to the bio-electric frequencies emitted by plants. They named it the “Door”, after their favorite rock band. And suddenly there it was, in all its everyday horror. Plants talking to plants. A brain-shift that made the discovery of fire, seem as insignificant, as the mass-marketing of granola.
“Do Plants Think?” was the headline in the New York Times. For ten million Americans and 900 million Hindus, the angst was enormous. This was a paradigm shift of stupendous proportions. Suddenly, one day, you woke up, and looked out your window, and all you saw everywhere, were eentsy green “people”.
Eating lettuce became an act of cannibalism. Nobody had yet figured out how to talk to a chicken or a mackerel, but tomatoes and cucumbers were spewing out the raciest details of their lives. You ever wondered what it was like hanging around in a bunch of bananas? Now you knew. You ever wondered what trees do? Now you knew. America was more emotionally immobilized, than when the Space Shuttle blew up.
Other, older, cultures took the news in stride. Expensive European restaurants even invented sick little games, of talking to your vegetables, right at your table, before you ATE them. Aficionados said it was a more intimate experience, than eating live monkey brains, in Bangkok.
And then, of course, came the backlash. When one enterprising young journalist pointed out how large the trees grew, around cemeteries, the Washington Post clamored, “Do Plants Eat US?”… What a question.
Senators, congressmen and pop-scientists, choked the airwaves, with dippy proclamations and florid nonsense, stoking the engines of publicity, and confusing everybody within electronic earshot. And then the draft horses of academia put on their overalls and went to work. REAL work. Out of the Petri dishes and back into the bushes they went, knee deep in mud – botanists, zoologists, journalists, and ozone-brained mushroom-eaters – vying with each other, spying on plants, spying on each other, each hoping to nab a breakthrough. It didn’t take long.
After a few brief weeks in the field the gold diggers and sleuths compared tape recordings, and mud-splattered notes, in stunned disbelief. They triple-checked their data, scoured the facts for any contradictory evidence whatsoever, merged into a Group Mind, and finally issued a preposterous statement to a shaken world:
People don’t grow corn. Corn grows people!
Zowie!
A conspiracy of corn?
Zowie!
Could it possibly be true that thousands of years ago corn had embarked on a conscious agenda to propagate itself by training people, to sweat their behinds off, planting it and weeding it and fertilizing it? How else could this over-sized Meso-American grass, have spread itself to every country on every continent, in less than 500 years? It was a dazzling proposition, and to understand the whole thing, all you had to do was roll down your window and listen.
It was their attitude, more than anything, that struck you – like listening to the Watergate Tapes. Yeah, all they were really doing, was gossiping about new fertilizers and pesticides and the price of oil to run the combines; but darling, the way they looked at it, men and machinery were just interchangeable parts, invented to serve THEM.
Corn, in fact, was a mutant – a genetic deviation long-ago earmarked for extinction. With its thick-husked cob, it had very little chance of reproducing in the wild. Sure, a few deer occasionally tossed some ears around, and trampled some seeds into the ground, but corn’s probability of success had been quite limited – until it trained people to admire it and cultivate it…
And… there was MORE.
Corn was not a single corn plant. Corn meant all corn. Similarly, a cow was all cows. A person was all people. To corn, the progress of agriculture meant the overwhelming success of corn, at the expense of everyone else – millions of other plant and animal species. That’s how they looked at it. That was the Conceit of Corn.
And to hear this startling elitism in revolting detail, all you had to do was park your car next to any cornfield, roll down your window, tune in your hand-held decoder-receiver, and just LISten. Cornism. In time it came to represent something more sinister than Stalinism. Mothers used the sheer menace of the word, to scare two-year-olds, into peeing inside the round white hole. “If you don’t do what mommy tells you, the corn will get you.” Cornism. Evil stuff.
Corn was a big supporter of beef and chicken production. You didn’t have to be able to add and subtract inside your head, to figure out why. People couldn’t possibly eat as much corn as cows or chickens, so the more people who ate cows or chickens, the more corn they had to grow.
In a murky sort of way, cows and chickens were in on the conspiracy too. Clearly, there would never be so many cows or chickens, if they hadn’t trained people, to feed them and protect them from predators – or to prefer them, over such other species as grouse or elk, which had suffered devastating declines, in the onslaught of agriculture. Chickens had gone from being a scrawny Indian forest bird, to the third most widespread vertebrate on the planet – behind humans and rats. And all because of corn.
It was decades before anyone figured out what the wild animals had to say about any of this, and by then it was WAY too late. By then the ego-blinded pimple of consciousness, humans called “civilization”, had devolved into the backward-running nightmare, of a Puerto Rican street gang leader in Chicago, named Cha Cha Lobotomowski – an INhuman being if there ever was one. A fast-spreading gangrene on the toe of higher “culture” – a psychosomatic mushroom cloud irradiating “shopping”, “journalism” and “education” in one garlicky sneeze – a peppery pork sausage jammed up the nose of the “American way of life.” But we are ill-prepared to meet this street tyrant, this Cha Cha, just yet.
For now, it is enough to understand that corn and cows, would have gone the way of the giant tree fern, and the wild buffalo, had they not been capable of tricking humans into breeding them and feeding them – tilling the prairies, trudging through thigh-deep snow, lugging bags of grain, scooping the do-do out of their barns. Some deep, mysterious, existential magic, must be afoot, when someone, can induce someone else, to weed her and feed her and clean up her poop, wherever it happened to drop.
Yes…HER. Civilization was overwhelmingly “HER” – from Mother Nature to Mother Earth, the Mother Church to the Mother Lode, Mother Russia to the Mother Tongue. Everywhere modern man looked, what he found was WOman.
Despite the fact that Mater, the Latin word for Mother, was the root word of Materialism, popular mythology insisted that men were more materialistic than women. Men were object-oriented, and women were people-oriented. That’s why men played team sports, and six times more retail shopping space was devoted to women. Women demanded equality. They wanted to be senators and judges. But they saw no reason they should register for the military draft, or mine coal. Men were labeled as the “oppressors of women”, but 19 out of 20 people who died on the job were men. “Common knowledge” had been warped into a psycho-social disconnect. People were being trained to believe things, that bore no relationship to what they saw, when they looked out their windows. It’s as if 50 years of media propaganda had imbued us all, with the “fact”, that elephant’s ears, were really wings – and we, believed them!
As human civilization drew nearer, The End, newscasters and social pundits couldn’t even muster the mental wherewithal to ask the right questions any more. They were lost in abstractions. They talked about the “economy”, while buildings crumbled around them. They talked about the need for improved “day care”, while armed gangs of day care graduates prowled their streets. They talked about “free trade” as huge corporations squashed competition, by buying politicians, who gave them special government hand-outs and tax holidays.
Ever since the last food-hunter put down his bow, civilization had become obsessively materialistic – judging its success by its ability to control and reformulate nature, rather than to improvise and cooperate with it.
BLAME IT ON CORN.
Blame it on television. Blame it on men.
But at the end of the day, the MOTHER of all questions remained… WHO… was controlling… WHOM? huhmm
[birds]
As you all know by now, I won’t take corporate advertising on this show. No Google ads, nothing like that. So if you wanna help me keep going with this, consider making a donation, or going to amazon.com and buying a book or DVD, (maybe even THIS book: Your Brain Is Not Your Own). Or maybe…convince a wealthy friend to buy one of my oil paintings. That would help. You should be sure to check out the paintings. Go to happyfool.orG and click on Oil Paintings. The paintings do sell, and are almost universally liked. Except for the one of my ex fiancé’s ass… Women hate it… Men love it.
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[sex groan]
This is The Rude Guy. I’ll be back. Stay strong. Don’t let anybody intimidate you. Don’t let anybody shame you. No more bullshit. That’s our motto…. No more BULLssshhhiiittt.
Ahhhh, feels a little better already.