What Jim Does

MANIAC MEMORIES BY JIM GUSTAFSON

WHAT DO YOU DO?


What do you say when they say “What do you do?” I say I play the
blues on my red kazoo. That I teach yoga to yahoos. That I have a ranch
in Australia where I breed blue suede kangaroos. I steal women’s shoes
and sell them to perverts over an 800 line. I do gardening with lasers.
I clean houses with plastic explosives. I’m on welfare. I’m on heroin.
I’m on parole. I teach the art of Ninja to ninnies. I’m a professional
identity designer. Nothing, I’m rich. Nothing, I’m emotionally crippled.
I’m a media mogul who moonlights as a Chippendale dancer. I manufacture
ladies lingerie for Frederick’s of Krakow. I play golf with beatniks.
I design then live in the cities of the future... which sometimes takes all
afternoon. I sell gizmos to gooks. I wholesale freeze-dried mail order
brides. I design Boy Kaddafi’s stage outfits and sometimes read him his
fan mail. What do I do? Well, I’m waiting for this think tank thing to
come through so I can get tanked and think of new ways to screw citizens
out of the dollar or two they’d like to use to buy brew but instead goes
to you know who. I loot shopping malls in radiation zones. I cruise
the art zoos looking for what’s new in mutations. I sell crack at the
United Nations. I don’t have just one occupation. I’m an amalgamation,
a confederation, a conspiracy and a conglomerate. I do what I have to do
because I’m a man... that’s spelled M – A – N. I don’t do anything,
I’m just a writer.

© Jim Gustafson Estate, 2009, courtesy EXQUISITE CORPSE

My critical review of this piece is as follows:

No criticism.

- Rick

You talkin' to me?

What Jim Does

MANIAC MEMORIES BY JIM GUSTAFSON

WHAT DO YOU DO


What do you say when they say “What do you do?” I say I play the
blues on my red kazoo. That I teach yoga to yahoos. That I have a ranch
in Australia where I breed blue suede kangaroos. I steal women’s shoes
and sell them to perverts over an 800 line. I do gardening with lasers.
I clean houses with plastic explosives. I’m on welfare. I’m on heroin.
I’m on parole. I teach the art of Ninja to ninnies. I’m a professional
identity designer. Nothing, I’m rich. Nothing, I’m emotionally crippled.
I’m a media mogul who moonlights as a Chippendale dancer. I manufacture
ladies lingerie for Frederick’s of Krakow. I play golf with beatniks.
I design then live in the cities of the future... which sometimes takes all
afternoon. I sell gizmos to gooks. I wholesale freeze-dried mail order
brides. I design Boy Kaddafi’s stage outfits and sometimes read him his
fan mail. What do I do? Well, I’m waiting for this think tank thing to
come through so I can get tanked and think of new ways to screw citizens
out of the dollar or two they’d like to use to buy brew but instead goes
to you know who. I loot shopping malls in radiation zones. I cruise
the art zoos looking for what’s new in mutations. I sell crack at the
United Nations. I don’t have just one occupation. I’m an amalgamation,
a confederation, a conspiracy and a conglomerate. I do what I have to do
because I’m a man... that’s spelled M – A – N. I don’t do anything,
I’m just a writer.

© Jim Gustafson Estate, 2009, courtesy Exquisite Corpse

NYC CAN March: Mark Crispin Miller

Who's On First?

Wall Street: Same Mistake Twice?

A year since the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. plunged the U.S. into a massive financial crisis, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the NYTimes stated on Charlie Rose last night that to date, despite windstorms of rhetoric, no new regulatory restrictions have been imposed on Wall Street by the federal government and that hedge funds, money market funds, investment banks and other traders are venturing back into high-risk operations and the trading of newly fabricated and highly complex financial products, these activities said to be capable of producing a new crash as big as last year's, when trillions of dollars of personal savings were permanently lost and the economy as a whole came to close to plunging into a major depression.

This is a clear indication of the role gross irrationality plays in our national life. Addiction to the profit motive to the exclusion of all other values is like an addiction to crack, a pathology in which even the instinct for self-preservation is lost. As a wise person said: "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

The Trouble With Artificial Economic Scarcity

Some of the hyper-rich, i.e. the upper 1 percent of the U.$. population that possesses 40 percent of the nation's wealth, as reported by Howard Zinn, are undoubtedly intelligent, hard-working, and, with the exception of their congenital blindness to the suffering artificial scarcity imposes on the working class, decent people, but as a whole the country club class can be classified as an enemy of rationality. It is not rational that the assets of this society are distributed in such a way that 47 million people have zero health insurance, resulting in an estimated 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year, according to press reports, and pushing the federal government toward bankruptcy. Wealth in this country needs to be redistributed via the tax code -- but that would require elected officials who are not funded by the hyper-rich, which is never going to happen without campaign finance reform that would enact public funding of all federal elections. Artificial scarcity exists to a large degree because of the enormous concentration of assets in that narrow, uppermost 1 percent, causing the rest of the members of society to fight among themselves in fierce competition for the remaining assets, this competition leading them to overlook the fact that the working class as a whole is being ripped off to an almost unbelievable extent.