Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 3
Howard Dean, like all the other Democrats, is just beginning to show up on the radar screen of the average American, so analysts are spinning their wheels looking for real traction to make predictions. I’ll make their job easy for them. Captain May sez Howard Dean is the Democratic candidate, and everything else is just hash for hacks to sort through so they can spin out clever clichés.
How do I know?
Same reason I knew we’d lose
Dr. Dean’s got foundation, but the media must reel in a small fish of truth day by day, even hour by hour, so it misses the big fish of substantial truth. They’re too busy with news, and they can’t do good intelligence. I learned that when I was in military intelligence, reading Pravda, Izvestiya and Krasnaya Zvezda. It takes a long while to pull in the big fish, and you’ve got to ignore the small fish; they’re only getting in the way. All right, enough teasing. Watch it in wonder as Captain May pulls in a whale’s worth of analysis:
Dean has the same advantage as Carter in 1976: He is a governor with a good record in his state, and he has clarity. I know I’m using words loosely, folks – writing about clarity among politicians is like talking about innocence in a porn movie, but I digress… He has stated his antiwar position from the git-go, and the war’s a bust. Take John Kerry, on the other hand. He’s compromised, reduced to semantics. There’s no defense for going along with dumb, failed fiasco. (Y’all paying attention?) “Smart call on the war,” the media pros will say, of Dr. Dean, but it wasn’t smart, it was clarity. The man spoke from his heart when we needed men to speak from their hearts, and he deserves his due.
Dr. Dean has Carter charm. He’s engaging, plays guitar well (Kerry does too, by the way, and I’m jealous of both of ‘em). He’s nice. Yep, I know what you pros are thinking: “That’s ‘cause he ain’t a pro like us.” You’re right folks, but don’t you ever get tired of being jaded?
After the media fiasco is out in the open right along with the military fiasco you’re going to have to admit that he was brave and true on the war, and then you’ll love him like his name was Kennedy. When you can do that again, you’ll be as charming as he is.
[Aside to publishers: The “charm” part means more market for your stale shit. OK, got it? I know what you need to know, gentlemen, so I keep it short and sweet when it counts.]
Dean is highly intelligent. You have to go all the way to General Clark to find a brain as good as Dr. Dean’s. He can think on his feet, and he doesn’t blow it with wasted words. Did anyone besides me notice that he was the only candidate to end his statements on time in the Tuesday debates? Yep, he did. It’s called being efficient, and it’s what you’d like to see in a president for a change, right?
Dean is hip, at least for a white boy. He’s making sure that the brothers see that he
doesn’t mind standing in front of graffiti, and he shouldn’t. How the hell are you going to address reality
in
Let’s talk reality, because that’s what graffiti is, the reality you don’t want to think about. I’d like to call my book a work of graffiti, and I’m proud to do it on the spot. Here’s the kind of real shit that makes rappers rap and taggers tag:
I’ve had a gunfight over a chick named Julia in the parking lot while I was
teaching about Cauplets and Montagues
next door. All right, you tell me where
drama stops and life starts? It’s even
harder to figure out when you’re a teenager wondering how the hell you’re
supposed to focus when there are bullets out there. This ain’t
Go to the ghetto – and don’t take Jayson Blair’s word for it if he tells you he’s been there – check it out. Be in the barrio. Confabulate with the Crackers. They’ve all got the stories, they’ve got the reality, and they know it sucks. So do y’all, by the way, which is why you live in loft apartments or cool houses where no one is crass enough to say the N-word and no black professional is crass enough to act like one. Y’all think Condi and Colin (Jesus, who named that child?) are real black folks? Haven’t y’all grown up saying that skin color is irrelevant? Well, in their case it really is. They’re whiter than y’all (apologies to my brothers and sisters, but I’m bitching at the Cracker Media now).
Harry Belafonte was right to say Powell was an Uncle
Tom, and Captain May sez that he and CLR qualify for
a minstrel show. I have to share credit
with that remembered phrase with Mr. Colemanoleman,
my eighty-year-old black friend. I visit
him every day, and he talks to me about things like Jim Crow and WWII in the
Pacific. I’ve adopted him as my
granddad, and when I rode my bicycle to
Back to reality… One of my students got mugged by the cops one night. Yeah, right you say? Yeah, right I say back at you, yeah, fucking right. Well, the kid’s home boys went out and spray painted HATER on the cop’s personal car the next day. You’d say he ought to go to jail; I say I gave him a professional salute in front of a class. His graffiti was MLK’s civil disobedience.
Another story? Four of my English students were outside on a sidewalk talking to me about Plato’s Republic as I stood in the grass… Two punks on mountain bikes came hauling ass down the side walk and nearly ran them down. These thugs didn’t brake and didn’t swerve; it was simple assault. Why didn’t someone call the cops?
Folks, it was the cops.
Thank God someone did
call the cops: Capitan Mayo (solamente a mis
amigos Hispanicos:
Oye,
Everyone got an A. I got four statements so that I could get two little pigs off our streets. Serves ‘em right – right? My kids said I was brave but stupid, and I might get myself killed messing with haters. (That’s what they call cops, folks, wonder why?)
They were right about my being stupid, but like I
said, I’m white, so it’s natural. I
played the system like a pro: I made
sure to line myself up with the superintendent of the
Shit, I’d been busted for fighting two years before, I’m
a martial artist, and any lying cop can bust a cap on a captain like me and get
off with any bullshit story he wants to use.
Ever been to
Everyone in the school wondered why it was that I began to arrive in the mornings with a backpack on me and a ten-mile hike behind me. Shit, I didn’t want to be ambushed, and I took a different route every time I left or returned to school; I entered the school from all directions; I rigged my window so that I could jimmy it and climb in from the outside so that I could use it in an emergency. That’s street reality, folks.
Listen to some goddamn Wyclef Jean, you dumbass honkies! Why is it that you have to wait until the brothers are tired of the shit before you think it’s hip to dig it? Shit, somebody in my poor race is going to have to grow some soul! Dr. Dean said he listened to WJ, so get some. Try The Score by the Fugees – it’s his breakout album, and the best-selling hip hop album since the genre started up; try Carnival next; try Ecleftic after that, and write me back if you can figure out the title pun the brother made to fuck with your mind. Shit, y’all could learn more from WJ than your bosses, I assure you.
WJ, hmmm…
Reminds me of WSJ, and makes all of y’all think that I’m going to take
after the Wall Street Journal for its pre-war war profiteering posturing, but
you’d be wrong children (and has anyone ever heard of paralipsis?). Nope, the WSJ is my
Like every romantic captain, I loved the praise, and as for all the good advice, I paid as much attention as I’m able. I’m just ornery and incorrigible, Barb, can’t help it. This is just the kind of nigga I am. Ooops! Did I just write nigger in an essay/letter/intelligence report? Nope, see, you don’t look for shit like you need to. I wrote nigga, and even white boys can be niggas, if they know how to flow… Never mind, never mind. Suffice it to say that in true hip culture, like that of my tag artists, anyone who wants to can be a nigga. All mis amigos Mexicanos are calling themselves niggas. As usual, you white boys are just slow to catch on to what’s cool. So niggas, please, take any and all nasty-assed hypocrisy about language to another hood. We don’t have much of it in mine.
Sorry Barb, stay with me, you’re used to my drifts, and there’s been a time or two that you called ‘em rifts, which was a cool turn of phrase. Do you remember when you and me and Major Kathleen Daniels got together when I finally made it up to see the city that never sleeps and never lets you sleep? Well, we were up there to bust the Army for systemic sexual harassment on the Geraldo show.
Yep, on Geraldo, I have no pride at all. I was willing to go on national TV by name of
Captain May and tell a one-star female Pentagon stooge that she was full of
shit when she parroted the (male) party line that the Army didn’t have a sex
problem. A few million souls saw and
heard me compare her to a Klanner who was saying that
just a few lynchings every year in
Anyhow, Barb, you showed me and the Major Daniels how
to ride the subways, and amazed us by telling us that you didn’t know how to
drive. We walked around a bit and went
to a diner for a sandwich, and I started talking Spanish to one of my brown
sisters, just like down home in H-town.
You tittered until you busted out laughing because she was from
I was charmed, Miss Phillips, but I knew I had to be good with Major Daniels there… By the way, I wrote a couple of op-eds for the Chronicle on the Army’s sexism. Didn’t help my career much, and I sort of dwindled out of the Army after that. It was worth it though, don’t you think?
Do you remember how I was writing editorials for bread over at Post/Newsweek for Steve Wasserman? Yeah, it was a gig, but you and Major Daniels, my two patronesses, said that scribbling 150 words a day was nothing more than writing a bubble gum card, and that I needed something that would hold my focus. Good news, Barb, I’ve found the thing that holds my focus. When I get a hip editor like you (not like that ragtag bunch at the Cowardly Chronicle), I’ll have a pretty good book here, don’t you think? It seems to be a new genre of its own, something like Michael Moore’s ambush journalism. It’s also mid-range literature, decent poetry and fucking outstanding military intelligence, if I do say so myself – and I do.
You’re in if you want in, just remember that I’ve
given you orders not to violate my confidentiality as a fearful source of
information alleging that my president has committed treason against the
American People. Please, please,
please don’t let anyone pass this e-mail, or any part of the book, around
Ain’t y’all figured it out yet? Bush ain’t tough, he’s just tough compared to you. You are his natural prey, because he is a bully. Well, boys and girls, I’m your dream boy if you want someone who isn’t scared of bullies – haven’t y’all figured that out yet? I know you’ve had a belly full of him, and it serves you right! His stooges (e.g., Sean Hannity, Frank Michel) will fall the hardest, and that’s fair, too. The last one to laugh at the emperor’s lack of clothes becomes part of the joke, right? Well, get off your knees when you’re tired of getting screwed by George XLIII – and listen hard when Captain May sez that’s what happens to you when you get embedded. Shit, y’all are going to have a hard time living that word down! It means your bosses are calling you whores, and you just smiled and took the paycheck. I hope you’re not with MSNBC. Jesus, they’re still using the E-word, as if there were any hope of propping it up. They call their political reporters “Campaign embeds.” Sucks to work for the squares, I guess. It’s been a while for me, and unemployment is a noble pursuit, when it comes out of principle. I’ve been fired every three years for a couple of decades now. How can I prove that unemployment is a good gig? Because y’all read my shit so you’ll know what’s real, and that proves that you trust me more than your bosses, so-called friends (mere contacts) and siliconed honeys. See, you can’t be profound if you’re not willing to risk being ridiculous. I’m ridiculously profound.
All right, we’ve started off the day with a fun essay, and I want to go light up and kiss Miss Mary (there’s a song about her in WJ’s Ecleftic, squares). You don’t know the embedding system I’ve worked out to work around you, do you? Nope? Read my WSJ stuff, then read my Chronicle piece on rap music from the fall of 2000. Pass it on to the NSA, they’ll have fun with it, because they’re as tired of Bush’s bullshit as any of you are. They need a laugh, and believe me, they’re plenty miffed at being dissed by the prez at every turn when they tried to steer him straight on intelligence.
How about I leave you with one more recommendation: Start showing Dr. Dean some respect by using his damn title! The man worked hard to learn medicine. If you’re going to call Condor Lisa “Doctor Rice” you can damn well call that man “Doctor Dean.”
And lastly, a few words for Dr. Dean: Go towards the brothers, and you can’t
miss. Black folks are the only folks
with any sense any more, and hip-hop reality is new reality that you can tap
into. Have your staffers watch the movie
Bullworth a
few times and let ‘em milk
the radical concepts. Hell, I’ve had
Ghost Troop, 3/7 Cavalry watching Wag the
Dog to explain media/military and Lawrence
of Arabia to explain both our Infowar here and
the military situation in
Sorry for not getting back with your people about the
graffiti backdrop for one of your urban speeches a couple of weeks ago, by the
way. I thought it was brilliant (which
means it was, Dr. Dean). I used to teach
some taggers, and they are the real media. In
RIP 3/7 CAV
CPTMAY
…appear to the public. But that’s not why it’s going up. It’s going up because the taggers have enough street sense to believe someone who tells them about the info-hustle. They understand a con when it’s shown to them, but then, colored folks are usually smarter than whites. I already mentioned that, didn’t I? See, dumb white man. They are very creative, and very brave, and very revolutionary.
Compliments, Doc
Captain May
Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 3