Can a New Brand Save Chrysler? The Dodge Fallopian

All right, my wife agrees that the Dodge Ram truck logo looks exactly
like a diagram of a uterus and fallopian tubes. Did gender confusion
play a role in the fall of Chrysler? Is it Ram Tough or Fallopian
Tough? Should Fiat drop macho and go feminist? I believe
MaryElizabeth would buy a Fallopian pick up just to make a political
statement--would anyone care to join her?

The Price of Breath Is Inhaling

Driving up the Carolina coast for Fourth of July at the beach, we passed miles and miles of Camp Lejeune, home of the U.S. Marines.

This stretch of road is truly Marineland--marquees on churches, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and hamburger stands repeated the same reminder: "Freedom is not free."

This notion first entered my consciousness in the rowdy junior high school I attended in my hometown in Kansas, where our beleaguered principal's motto, warning, and repeated incantation warding off the spirits of disorder was "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

In junior high, I could see the usefulness of this idea, just as I can see how people born without any bones in their body would need to wear a straitjacket to be able to stand up. If you have no self-discipline, I can understand how something like the Marine Corps could provide the exoskeleton you'd need to survive while you were getting your act together.

And six decades of life in America has taught me the light and dark sides of how freedom plays out in this country.

The price of Thomas Jefferson is Sally Hemings.

The price of Abraham Lincoln is the Civil War.

The price of Mark Twain is Ernest Hemingway.

The price of John Ford movies is Wounded Knee.

The price of Fred Astaire is the Great Depression.

The price of the Marx Brothers is the Three Stooges.

The price of Jon Stewart is Dick Cheney.

The price of the Sixties is having to listen to Lee Greenwood sing "God Bless the U.S.A." for the 40 years thereafter.

All in all I believe it's been worth it. But even now, after all these years, I still object to the notion of a trade off for freedom. When Greenwood whines that he's "proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free," it's like the old fart in Hard Day's Night stuck in the train car with the Beatles, grousing about having to have fought the war for punks like them. Says John Lennon, "I bet you're sorry you won."

There is no price to pay for real freedom. It is inherently priceless. In a slave society it's possible to buy your freedom; in a free society you get it by waking up each morning.

If you listen to Bob Dylan and think "Like a Rolling Stone" is about how hard it is to lose everything, rather than how absolutely liberating it is, you haven't got a handle on what freedom is about. He's not just asking a snide question. He's having an orgasm:

How does it feel
How does it feel
Oh, how does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

Have a happy Fourth.

The Trees Know Where Your Children Sleep

The old woman was paranoid. When they would pass a flatbed truck carrying goods protected by a tarp, she'd tell her daughter, "There's poison under there. Radioactive poison. They don't want you to know what it is."

Taxes were part of the conspiracy. "Why do they make us pay these taxes? It's not their money, it's our money. Who do they think we are their personal bankers skablanker money not theirs gabearus not fair to us badonkus worked for it and we should get to keepitkabeepit. I don't want to pay for all this stuff and it makes me mad doesn't it make you mad?"

"No, I'm not mad, because my money is going to pay for the national parks and I like the national parks."

"What?!"

"My money is all going to the national parks and that's where I want it to go."

"It doesn't work that way! They take your money and they use it the way they want to."

"Not mine they don't. Mine all goes to the national parks."

"You can't say where it goes. They take the money and do what they want with it."

"Not mine. I say mine goes where I want it to go."

"But you can't do that!"

"Yes, I can, and I'm happy doing it. You're the one who's sitting there having the heart attack, not me."

Was your dad as paranoid as your mother?

"Daddy worried all the time. He worried about us when we rode our bikes in the street. He worried when we climbed trees that we would fall out. He worried about things that logically might happen. But he didn't think the tree was going to suck us into its innards."

It's all part of their plan. The trees inhale the children, and then they fall on the house.

"That's how mother would have seen it--'That damned tree didn't fall on the house, it snuck over and jumped on it.'"

Downsizing Lucky

We've got our two dogs and five cats moved into the cottage. They all fit in 800 square feet, but moving from one room to another is complicated, particularly for the kittens.

These two are maturing, but have not outgrown chasing each other pell mell across the floor plan, which in the big house posed no problem, but in the cottage requires planning beyond these guys' capabilities.

Lucky is the big furry oversensitive fly in their ointment. Like most of our animals, this dog is a rescue from the pound, picked off death row by my wife with no regard for his past history. We know Lucky is scared of thunderstorms and that he, for whatever reasons, can't abide large black dogs.

We believe that somewhere in his private past he was captured, taken to an undisclosed location by terrorist cats, and tortured within an inch of his young life. He has been marked forever by some such horrible experience, because any time one of the cats gets within 20 feet of him he curls his lip and snarls viciously. Every time he does it we tell him to get over it, but he never has.

In our big former home the two kittens on a tear had plenty of room to move, but in the cottage, every chase path invariably leads right over the top of Lucky, who explodes in a paroxysm of rage, panic, and barking.

Doesn't faze the kittens a bit. They scramble over him as if he were one of the better special effects in a horror movie.

For poor Lucky, though, this is real life, so, rather than yelling at him, we give him whatever comfort we can.

Luckymuck

I just brought the dogs in from walking.

At the walking trail where I take the Sophie and Lucky some asshole kids had dumped the garbage can into the creek. I crawled halfway down the embankment and hauled the can up out of the ravine, just so I would have somewhere to dump Lucky's shit.

Lucky is the poopmeister; he lays out about three loads per walk, great big bulky handfuls of it. I say handfuls, because the best way to deal with this stuff is take a plastic bag, turn it inside out, pick up the shit with your hands, and then turn the bag inside out. This approach gives you the heft, warmth, and smell of the shit without having to squish it through your fingers.

So Lucky just by himself is a three-bag dog. Happily, Sophie is good for only one dump a walk, and she takes them back in the bushes where no one will notice, so I don't bother to pick hers up.

Lucky lays his out on sidewalk (all he's lacking is his own personal logo and brand, something like "Luckymuck" with little handcrafted signs saying "Stomp your Nikes in this pile!") and so I'm obligated to pick up after him. Then I throw the bags of shit in the garbage can, and then the kids dump the can in the creek. In East Tennessee, where I live, this is called "recycling."

The Bag o' Death

My wife has placed me in quarantine. This week I am battling a cold, and while she is perfectly willing to support the cause from afar, procuring war materiel--Puffs, antihistimines, aspirin from the grocery store--there is no way she is willing to join me on the front lines.

I understand and to some degree support her squeamishness. She works as a massage therapist, a hands-on, one-woman business that would quickly tank if her nose were dripping all over her clients on the massage table. I rely on her income as much as she does.

But it's been a lonely and comical week. When she enters the room she asks what I have touched, and promptly sprays the contaminated object--doorknob, countertop, drinking glass, cat--with Lysol. She waves cheerily at me as I drag my tired, stuffy head to my bachelor's bed each night. I carry my Puffs around with me as I move from room to room, along with a plastic sack full of used tissues she calls "The Bag o' Death."

Sneezing is discouraged, tolerated only if the sneeze is captured, successfully contained, and immediately disposed of in the BOD.

I like to think our enforced distance has brought us together. It has given us a common project, a goofy new child that we monitor constantly, a partnership of avoidance in which we both have a stake. It's an oversized ottoman in the living room around which we dance.

Slip ups are sweet. She buys a hot chocolate at Starbucks so delicious she impulsively gives me a sip. In my isolation I am never alone--I sneeze on the toilet and the door opens, a disembodied hand injects a disinfecting spritz of Lysol into the middle of the room, and quickly withdraws.

Rat Attack

Last night the PBS program Nova reported on cyclical plagues of rats in the Indian state of Mizoram, warning viewers that some of the scenes about to be shown were too graphic for the elderly, small children, and pets.

Every 48 years, it seems, a plague of rats descends on Mizoram state, a landlocked subtropical region politically part of India, but isolated from the rest of the country by its location east of Bangladesh. The rats devour the rice crop just before it is ready for harvest, leaving subsistence farmers to starve.

The last time this happened, in 1959, the distress was so dire is spawned a rebel uprising that continued for 20 years.

Well, there a were a few gross-outs. There were some shots of mother rats devouring their young, for example--evidently this is necessary because the rats themselves generally live in a state of semi-starvation, only catching a break once ever 48 years when the local bamboo goes wacko and produces a bumper crop of bamboo fruit, so much that the rats have more food than they know what to do with and reproduce at astronomical levels.

When the bamboo germinate and are no longer edible, the hordes of rats attack the rice. So there were lots of scary shots (it looked like they shot these in a studio) of rats running fast through the underbrush--representing, I guess, a particularly voracious version of rat scurrying.

The baby rats themselves were pretty disgusting, kind of pink slimy Raisinettes, and there was a great display by villagers at one point of a bag full of 300,000 stinking rat tails collected to cash in on the rat-tail bounty imposed by the government to combat the plague.

Really, the most sick-making moment was when the geeky Australian biologist Ken Alpin, the first man to connect the rat attack with the bamboo boom, was slicing over dead mother rats to count their embryos.

This guy was great--while he was out there in the fields rooting for the farmers in their battle against the rats, he also confided at one point to the camera that as a science geek, he couldn't wait to see the coming rat attack in all its horror--after all, happening once every 48 years as it does, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Of course, just like Ken, that's what I was there to see myself, and what the show was selling, an opportunity to see a full force rat attack on defenseless villagers. Alas, it was not to be. Moi, the farmer whose fields we were monitoring, had by sheer luck planted his rice just early enough to get most of it in before the rats hit.

They showed up, scratched their tiny heads, and then scurried off camera to ravish the fields down the road.

And so I, too, deprived of rat disaster, switched over to the State of the Union.