The Ghosts in the Machines
Around Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut, the red brick skeletons of a former life spent manufacturing wither away to empty, open-air morgues of a time older than our memories or the memories of our parents.
The buildings’ large, dusty windows are perforated – the frames rusted shut, the hardwear missing or broken too long ago to even forget – anything copper or aluminum was stripped away by looters who have since died of old age. The floors are coated with snow (in the winter), dust and the skeletons of dead birds. The walls are green and black with mildew if any are even standing. The great machines that were the heart of the buildings either now hold bird nests or were melted down a long time ago. The workers who were the soul died anonymously of old age before the looters.
From the Interstate, they look awful and decayed to the point where it’s not possible to think of these broken, rotting hulks of once-proud, once-productive buildings as anything but dead. But if one looks closely, one can still see the ghosts in the machines and hear the howls, screams and moans of not only the long-forgotten workers but of the long-forgotten factory.
Teodoro Obiang
I’m in the midst of applying for the W. Eugene Smith Fund with its additional Chapnick Fund. This is a photojournalism grand for the pursuit of humanitarian and human condition work – much like W. Eugene Smith did often at the expense of his own career.
Teodoro Obiang, President of Equitorial Guinea on Africa’s west coast, makes Saddam Husein look like Jimmy Carter high on ether. But unlike Hussein, Obiang isn’t an American installation. But, much like Iraq and the Middle East, Central and South America, Equitorial Guinea is an oil-rich nation and is run by a self-serving and vicious dictator. In 1995 (1998?) this arid nation found it’s oil…
The people are horrendously impoverished, uneducated, and malnourished. the government buildings are squalid and the West African nation has very little, if any, infrastructure.
However, Obiang lives a very lavish lifestyle and dubbed himself president for life.
Of course he is pals with the US and routinely flies to Houston…
I’ll build more on this as I learn more – taking advantage of the immediacy this medium affords. This also allows me the opportunity to check my sources and while adding more.
I want to spread the truth in this type of writing, I want to present information to you, my one and only reader – OK, maybe there are two or three.
The Sea
Yesterday, the sea at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, CT was alive and angry. They scowling sky above was haunted with the screaming souls of those who toiled and died by the wrath of the sea. And by those smiling from down above who were lucky enough to breathe a cold, damp lung full of the fierce briny air.
The sand wore the cold, wet blanket of fresh snow blown to fill the long-forgotten foot prints and the voids around the small, sea-blown debris.
GOP buying the spineless Press and other old news
Here we go again – the GOP showing in flashing neon glory its intent to deceive the overly willing to be deceived public. This time, instead of making the few journalists who actually report on news reveal their sources or instead of killing journalists in foreign nations*, the Education Department covertly hired a journalist as a talking head to inflate the ill-conceived No Child Left Behind Act in the media.
*Our Army – the ‘best trained and best equiped army in the World’ – got pretty good at ‘accidentally’ launching rockets at hotels in Afghanistan where journalists were staying. They got pretty good at killing journalists with ‘friendly fire’.
I’m glad we have the best trained and best equipped army in the world.
And of course there is the mess in Abu Graihb (sic). Luckily, the solders involved were so well trained and equipped. Luckily the definition of ‘torture’ can be changed to suit those doing the torturing.
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that the GOP changed the rules to suit them when some of their crooked, and self-serving misdeeds bit them in the ass…
Otherwise we, as a Better Nation, might look bad.
And they gave Clinton a hard time for a BJ? If people only knew what was going on, they would wish the GOP and Cabinet were just getting blow jobs.
One last note:
Donald Rumsfeld lives in Maryland. Email me for the address…
Remember, Bush and his supporters think we should be well-armed with not only beer and Bibles, but also shotguns. Wal-Mart sells them cheaply to almost anyone, even in Maryland.
New Year’s Eve
I was in Rockerfeller Center where the MTV guy Carson something was doing some sort of live show. Well, he was doing the ‘live’ bit 2 hours early and the live music was shot 3 weeks before. Awesome – It was shot live, just not when the viewer is led to think.
The night went down with out any problems. The weather was kind and the City was alive as usual.
Part of the night I noticed that it was eerily quiet. The normal sounds of rushing taxis, buses and normal commuting was replaced with the moving, festive sounds of schuffling feet, din of 1000′s of conversations in every language and of course, the blowing of plastic horns and other means to create excessive noise.
Helicopters hovered high above just over the roofs of the buildings and police of every rank and sensibility manned each corner. Some of them congregated lazily in threes, fours or fives leanign on blue NYPD barricades.
Our New Year ticked into life aboard the 11:34 train for Westport – en route home. It gets dull after a while even on New Year’s Eve.
