Errol Morris hammers nails in the coffin with the help of the New York Times. Wish they had done it sooner…
( I know you don’t want to see any pictures of George Bush any more but what about if it is pictures of him crying? It still makes me happy.)
What can I tell you about going to work on a weed farm that the Grower, The Trimmers and The Landowner won’t kill me for? Soft criminals are especially tense about getting put in cages by men with guns….
A very special edition of Dave Reeves’ “Do The Math” column in Arthur 32/December 2008. Illustration by Arik Roper. Photos by Daniel Chamberlin.
In 1996 Californians passed a Proposition called 215 that allowed a citizen to go to a doctor to get certified as demented enough that a federally banned vegetable substance known as a “Joint” is the only remedy. The Doctor gets a hundred dollars. The Citizen gets a number, a little patch, and if things go a certain way during the Bush Obama changeover, a free ride to a Special Federal Camp.
American victory in Vietnam! That’s right! Iraq too! We always win!
by Dave Reeves
originally published in Arthur No. 31 (Oct 2008)
Hanoi, Vietnam: I’m in Vietnam picking out a baby for my Prius. Problem is, the damn babies all look the same. Needing to calm down, I pay fifty bucks for what looks like weed and smells like weed; but when rolled into Bob Marley blunts only gets me high enough to watch television. I’m mad, until I realize that getting ripped off for illegal drugs in a supposed Buddho/communist country indicates a total victory of the Judeo-Christian/capitalist cause.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t declare victory over nothing. It’s not about fifty bucks. I consider occasional rip-offs to be like union dues in the underworld. I’ve paid money for a baggie of gravel in Amsterdam, purchased placebos purporting to be mescaline in Texas and ingested sheets of Georgia rat poison acid. Besides, I get ripped off for real back in California all the time, what with the rolling blackouts, profit prisons and wars without end.
It’s the constant miracle of Hanoi traffic that got me open to the hustle. Vietnamese people tend to ride their mopeds at full speed, in a scrum, about as far from one another as you are from this page. The stoplights are but suggestions, hidden behind the foliage, way up on the periphery behind the “go” sign. The side of the road a driver chooses is dictated by whimsy. Nonetheless, at each intersection the masses of mopeds weave through each other unscathed,with no cursing, nor shots fired.
I thought this symbiosis indicated that Buddhism was The Answer, because it’s about respect for the value of human life and yadda yah. It only takes one terrible joint to realize that the reason the Vietnamese people can ride like that is because their weed sucks. Don’t try that shit back in California. Those motherfuckers are high.
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from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008
CULLING TIME by Dave Reeves
Illustration by Sharon Rudahl
“A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling.”—Nietzsche
If we are in Iraq looking for the guys that did the Nineleven caper we’re stupid because, according to the FAA, the pilots are usually among the first people to arrive at a crash site.
The only other 9/11 joke I’ve heard is:
Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Nine eleven
Nine eleven who?
You said you would never forget me.
Yeah, it’s not funny. Not just because the feeling isn’t dead. It plays on the fact that 9/11 is an old heartbreak whore of ours, the one who unfettered our basest desires, which we’ll be paying for for the rest of our children’s lives. Har de har.
Your kids are going to be pissed when they see the pictures which Colin Powell pointed at when he talked us into World War Three.
“Daddy is it true that you guys started World War Three over a picture of a meth lab out in the desert?”
“Well honey see we didn’t have no education back then and so we didn’t know that nuclear fission takes whole buildings full of advanced ceramics, Germans and yellow cake uranium to manufacture…”
It’s good that we can’t tell a meth lab from a nuclear bomb-making facility because it means that our elders saw fit to give us the gift of bliss, which more judgemental people would call ignorance. With this bliss we are free to see the world without any preconceived notions based on science or pre-known facts.
Back when people got educations they were indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believed crazy shit like the Civil War was fought to free black slaves. Anybody stupid enough to think that white people went to war and killed other white people for the rights of black people will be stupid enough to believe that we are looking for Osama Bin Laden in Iraqian Permian basin.
Continue readingOriginally published in Arthur Magazine No. 28 (March 2008)
Illustration: Joseph Remnant
Do the Math: CITIZEN HEAR ME OUT! THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!
by Dave Reeves
There were Laws, but they were not feared. There were rules but they were not worshiped like laws and rules and cops and informants are feared and worshiped today. –Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Elko”
If you are reading this magazine then there is a pretty good chance that you break some stupid ass law every other day. Be it dabbling in tax evasion, watering your lawn on Thursdays, smoking weed, walking your dog without a leash, or drinking two and half beers before driving home, you are overdue to beg for the non-existent mercy of some unlaid grinch posing as a judge (you know who you are, Kirkland Nyby). I’m here to tell you that being a white non-violent person with all your teeth will not be enough to save you from doing hard time for minor infractions anymore.
America has slid far past the point where a well-regulated militia would be able to relieve us of our vicious tyrants. The myriad weapons and tactics perfected over the course of our many stupid foreign wars are easily turned against the American civilian population. We are cowed behind the magic of infrared radar helicopters, electronic ball breakers, automatic weapons and a skein of surveillance cameras: the American population rendered naked to the aggression of a police state gone corporate.
I have seen the future and it is California. That which is not illegal is mandatory. If you find yourself in California, here’s what you should do:
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“Do the Math” column originally published in Arthur No. 26
BLANK IN THE FILL by David Crosby Reeves
“For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.” —Chomsky
In the days of President Carter, a fluoride program went through the public schools called ‘Swish and Spit.’ First grade students were given permission slips and told to bring them back with a parent’s signature. I was a good kid then, eager to prove myself. I took my permission slip to my mother. She put it aside and didn’t sign it.
The day the ‘Swish and Spit’ program was implemented, Ms. Goldie brought out a bottle of red fluid and told everyone, ‘This is fluoride, and it tastes good.’ It looked like cherry Kool-Aid. I never got to taste it because I didn’t have my permission slip.
I was left alone while the other kids went to the sink and did the Kool-Aid. ‘Swish and Spit’ was just that. Everybody came back with red tongues like they had eaten a Slushy.
Ms. Goldie came to me, wanting to know where my slip was. I had a sense that this was one of the first tests of this new thing called School, and I was eager to be good. I wanted to drink the Kool-Aid to commune with the other kids, the kool kids, and become one with the institution.
So when I get home I told Ma, ‘I got to get this thing signed!’ ‘What is it for?’ she wanted to know. I explained that the ‘Swish and Spit’ was good for me, harmless, and probably cherry Kool-Aid.
‘What did I tell you about people coming to you with candy?’ my mom asked me. She went on about how the product was manufactured to look like candy so that I would want it, but we didn’t know what was in it.
My argument was, Sure we know what’s in it: fluoride. It makes strong teeth. But Ma wasn’t signing it because she said the government should not be giving you anything, nor should you trust them to give you anything. It sets a bad precedent. And why would a government that cares so little about your health that I can’t afford health care suddenly care so much about your teeth?
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Originally published in Arthur No. 19 (Nov 2005)…
Man Roots Culture
By Dave Reeves
Fall is here, and it’s time to think about how you’re going to maintain your erection for the long winter months. Buying Viagra pills might do the trick, but face it, you are going to be broke after giving all your money to the gas man, so take my advice and pick up a dub sack of American ginseng instead.
Buying ginseng is like buying drugs; you’re going to get ripped off unless you know the deal. They won’t have it at the hippie health food store because hippies are afraid of the awesome power within. For the real you have to go to Chinatown. Go in any place that has a neon ginseng root in the window, or a picture of ginseng on the sign.
If you aren’t overwhelmed by the smell of the ginseng when you go in the door then you are not in the right place. The best places will have barrel after barrel of various roots and then thousand dollar roots laid out in little boxes to look like little people—hence the Chinese name that ginseng was bastardized from: Jenshen, or “man root.” These roots are prized as much for their size as for their shape and the super fat ones will supposedly do the same thing for your penis, which is the real reason they call it a “man root”.
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originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 21 (March 2006)
Trust the Government
by David Reeves
I know your career isn’t going so good right now because it takes a great artist time to get his game together enough to overthrow the dominant bladdy blah…but face it, you’re unemployed.
Join the Army. I’m serious. It would totally legitimize you, your art and your tattooes. You love shitty dive bars, “found art” and thrift stores. Army bases have all of that in spades.
If you rank as one of hardened hipsters who are unafraid to waltz the avenue of Echo Park, where at least three gangsters have been gunned down in the last month then, please, for the sake of freedom, get down to the recruiter and join now before the big rush.
With the cost of gas, outsourcing and downsizing, economic conscription isn’t just for Mexicans anymore. Our great country has been mismanaging the current “White Man’s Burden” by sending the high school football squad instead of the best of the breed.
Which is why the Iraqis are so pissed off. They were expecting the Americans from the “OC” television show to liberate them. When the real teens of Orange County showed up blaring Pantera and sneaking peeks at the ankles of their women, they felt duped.
It’s a sensitivity issue and obviously Oprah is too busy to get involved so, now more than ever, America needs those coffeehouse radicals who were brave enough to gentrify Brooklyn into Williamsburg.
Continue reading“Do the Math” column by Dave Reeves
originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 22 (May 02006)
Close the Borders
Masses teem at the border demanding to be exploited. The Christian nature of America obliges us to take our “border brothers” in after running them through a rigorous desert obstacle course to cull out the weak. The surviving braceros go on to make up the disenfranchised worker caste which the civil rights movement strove so hard to eradicate. “We shall overcome” has been overwhelmed.
Big business loves undocumented Latinos. They take less pay to work harder at jobs that black people won’t do, they can’t vote, and believe in a book which was written to comfort slaves called “the Bible.”
Sense dictates that burgeoning populations should be checked with birth control, but the Bible won’t allow it. Companies no longer pay well or offer benefits because the Bible says that believers must have unprotected sex, pick up serpents and speak in tongues. God has (intelligently) designed a situation where his true believers hope to be conscripted for a pittance into a foreign and hostile country.
Latinos leave their homeland because their country’s infrastructure is undeveloped due to the fact that a majority of their nation’s business is off the books. Mexican drug trade rakes in between 27 and 32 billion dollars a year, while the national oil industry, Pemex, brings in only 7 to 8 billion. Pemex tax pays for El Presidente and his entourage. Untaxed drug profits manifest into typical cheap money detritus: flashy cars, shitty bars and corpses in Tijuana wearing Dolce and Gabbana.
This vast economy of underground drug money sustains a system so corrupt that only a revolution can wipe it away. But the Great Overdue Mexican Revolution is deferred with every Mexican who flees to America to wash dishes.
Continue readingTRIGGER HIPPIES
“Do the Math” column by Dave Reeves
originally published in Arthur No. 23 (July 2006)
Blackout. Summertime. Populace accepts that utility companies have again fried the grid for profit. Hours go by. Americans go without television, SUVs, flash-fried food. Coffee runs out. Shortages of chronic and chronic shortages. Rumor becomes news. Alcohol reserves are drunk away and the rabble seethe in the street, commiserating about how it was this very publication that printed the recipe for the diabolical bomb that left the assholes standing but killed their precious machines. [see our Q&A with Derrick Jensen from Arthur 23 – ed.]
Emergency personnel stay at home because, like that great American Bob Dylan said, “The cops don’t need you and, man, they expect the same.” The National Guard is busy on the border, the French Quarter and Iraq. Everyone is a suspect.
“There he is! I saw him reading that Arthur!” the mob yells.
And then, dear reader, you realize that when the transistors are dead, the world is run by a lower phylum of machine: the gun.
Now I’m not saying you need to get one, but you can never be too careful what with this Arthur magazine monkeying around with these new-fangled technology bombs. Of course you are scared of guns because the liberal media constantly portrays people misusing these valuable tools. The smart hipster won’t let crappy television writers’ abuse of the pistol as a modern day Deus Ex Machina divert her from the path of preparedness. Just think of a gun as one of those “Talking Sticks” at a Rainbow Family Gathering: if you have a Talking Stick, you get to say something and people have to listen, and if you don’t have one you have to shut the hell up.
Here’s a list of “sensitive weapons” that even a vegetarian could use in the near future, cribbed in these last precious moments while this computer still works. I’ve listed them in the order that they should be purchased, so that you may gradually warm to the idea of being a citizen capable of doing what it takes to keep America on course.
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