Mad Mel Gibson was described in Slate Magazine by Christopher Hitchens as being entirely too close to anti-Semetic when the recently intoxicated movie star refused to distance himself from his father’s assertion that the Holocaust never happened and then promptly made a film depicting the idea of Jews as the Christ-killer.

The newest dish is that there isn’t any question about Gibson’s antisemetic credentials any more.

The left coast press is abuzz with the incident investigation reports of Mad Mel’s arrest in which he flings around his weight (“I OWN Malibu”), insults a policewoman (“What are you looking at, sugar tits?”) and, most tellingly, slops around a few choice “Jew” comments, including the allegation that the Jews are the cause of all the wars since 1935.  He even wants to know if the arresting officer is a Jew (aren’t all cops Irish?).

Mel’s now issued an apology for being drunk and belligerent, and says he’s been battling alcoholism for his entire adult life and really reallly  realllllllly appreciates the police.  He didn’t apologize for any of the slurs, however.

You can get some of this stuff off Slate.com and anything else you want to know off the Hollywood dish sheet called TMZ.com.

I don’t know why it delights me to see Mel Gibson in hot water, but it does.   

Darling of the ultra right evangelicals for being the auteur of the SM version of the last hours of Christ, Mel Gibson was arrested last night in Malibu for drunk driving.

Do you think castration before being pulled apart by ponies, a la William Wallace, would be an appropriate punishment?

Deport that Aussie criminal!

It doesn’t matter anyway.

“Dirt nap” will come and then we’ll be forgotten.

Mother Earth may soon just shake us all off like a yard dog with fleas for our ecological crimes.

The AntiChrist is rising in the mid-East and Armageddon is nigh.

The terrorists will soon have nukes.

Sooner or later, the sun will expand and burn us to a crisp.

The good you do will go to the grave with you, but the evil will live on and your enemies will remember you longer than your friends.

So, throw in the towel.

Fuhgettaboutit.

Who cares?

What the hell?

So, tonight, I’m going down to Norman and play on a giant slip’n’slide, trying to best a mythical world record.

Hope they don’t test me for doping.

This heat is getting me down.  That, and the mimosa is blooming and killing my allergies.

My money is on top of me and I’ve just realized that the last faint hope that a woman who looks like Christy Brinkley and has the mind of Madame Curie is going to sweep into the Paseo and take me away in her Bentley…well, that hope is gone.

My big nightmare of the past few years is that I’ll end up dead in a Barcalounger in a walk up flat that stinks of old grease and used kitty litter in front of a black and white TV with aluminum foil on the rabbit ears.  I’ve got the used kitty litter smell thing going already.

As my hope fades, my fears solidify.

It’s not a recipe for happy blogging.

So, ignoring my wretched past and ignominious future, I had fun last night with Oz, Deb and Gary watching “Dead Man”, a Jim Jarmusch film starring Johnny Depp.  Depp is good in everything he does and this was a strange movie, dubbed “zen western” by Oz, that had a slew of “B” celebs like Iggy Pop.

This followed a perfectly lovely meal at Iron Starr with about a dozen of us digging into ribs and assorted “urban barbecue” dishes.

It seems the big news of the day is that Kat has breasts.  Who woulda guessed?  They are there in all their glory in this week’s Gazette and Kat’s mom is over the top about it.

 There’s a new “green” sports car with an electric motor that goes 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and does it silently.  It’s $80,000 to $120,000 and very cool.  Mike H. turned me on to it.  Very Xtreme Cool.

I took on a contingency fee case in June and we were ready to try the case down in Ardmore but then, in the course of a mere 3 days, the case and the client fell apart.  Those things happen, but in my case, it meant I had a hundred hours of work in a case that produced zero money and, in fact, I had a negative $265 because I spent my own money on travel down to Ardmore, etc.  When I was doing my billing yesterday, it showed.  Just as I was writing about U.S. foreign policy below, since I put time in on that case, I wasn’t putting in time on clients/cases with hourly fees.  I don’t know how I’ll make it through the next month without going into bankruptcy.

And I am bummed.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a political candidate, Jantz, running for the GOP nomination for State Senate in the OKC “bubble” area and about how this theocrat had campaign literature with — it seemed to me — inappropriate religious appeals to voters.

Well, sure enough, the guy won the GOP nomination and will be on the November ballot.

I wonder if someday we’ll be denied blood transfusions because the Jehovah’s Witnesses flex their political muscle.  Even good religion makes bad politics and I can’t for the life of me understand why more people don’t see this.

BTW, Ericka West is blogging again over at Karmic Ironies.  The vicissitudes of her romantic life have taken a turn that put her in front of her keyboard again, I take it.  However, RJ at Diatribe 101 is now 3 weeks behind on posting.  Bad Kitty.

i’m going to go swelter now.  Talk to y’all later.

Me with Iman.  Check out the dark hair on Johnny boy!

I’m supposed to look evil.  Is it working for me?

I did a photo shoot Sunday in my mom’s back yard around the pool.

The male models were Justin, Dillon and me.

The female models were Iman, Amber and Madison.

The photographer was Shae and the stylist was Autumn.

The lovely Juliet of Elastic Cafe was there to oversee and just be cool.

Another photog, Glen, was there shooting pics of the process and the Oz showed up to get some video for his movie, “As good a place as any”.

We were lucky that the weather abated and that we were in the pool to knock down the heat.

When I get the new photos in a day or so, I’ll post at least one of them here.

I have only seen a few of the shots of me, but I know that among them is a “head shot” that’s good.

We did many shots of models doing model things, but standing in the pool, which gave everyone a shimmering light blue background that was very very interesting and attractive.

Madison, just turned 16 and not yet driving, was there with her mother, Diane.  After Autumn did her makeup and hair style, Madison did NOT look merely 16 and that was odd because she, of course, was sweet and naive and very teenager in person but looks amazing and grown up in a photo.

I did several shots with Iman, a 6 foot tall Tunisian woman with terrific looks and a fun and funny personality.  She drove down from Tulsa for the shoot.

My role was dominant male and there are lots of shots of me sneering.

Mom handled all the uproar that started at 6 a.m. with her usual aplomb.

A QUICK NOTE ABOUT SATURDAY

Spent a little time Saturday night at the Red Cup for its anniversary party and the after party at Tony’s.  I had a great time, but a 5:30 a.m. wakeup sent me home before the pyrotechnics really got started. 

WARNING:  This is about foreign policy and American politics, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Levant.  If you are not deeply interested in policy questions, this will likely bore you beyond tears.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I GOT TIRED OF WONKING AND STOPPED MIDWAY.  GUESS MY OWN INTEREST IN POLICY QUESTIONS WANED.  SO HERE’S A PARTIAL POST FROM OVER THE WEEKEND AND THINK WHAT YOU MAY

In a way, this is about the path not taken.

We live in a finite world.

America has great power, perhaps more than all the rest of the countries of the world and certainly more than any one other country.

However, there are limits.

The latest video on Al Jazeera of Osama bin Laudin in the tribal areas of Pakistan is a perfect refutation of the notion of unlimited American power.

That’s a simplistic point, but it has its larger implications.

Because we have 150,000 American troops in Iraq, those troops are not capable of also being on the Korean peninsula.  They can’t be in two places at once.

Making the choice to have American armies in Baghdad is to also choose not to place them elsewhere.

Similarly, spending $200 Billion prosecuting the American presence in Iraq means that money is not being spent on health care.

To spend that $200 Billion at all has economic consequences since most of it is borrowed money that is globally inflating the U.S. dollar, increasing our national debt, etc., etc.

We can’t do everything.  We can’t do just anything.  And, we can’t do all of what we’d like to do at one time.

The point is fundamental, I agree, but since it is fundamental, it’s important and must be at the forefront of our thinking, in my view, especially at the current crossroads we face in that arc of discord that goes from India-Pakistan across the great mountains of Afghanistan and into the crescent of Trade Route cities from Kabul through Teheran through Baghdad and Damascus to the Mediterranean Beirut, then south to Jeruselem.

One of the points I want to make here is that although this is a very important part of the world and although what is happening there is extremely important, we focus on those problems to the exclusion of other problems.

There is also war in Somalia.

North Korea is testing long range missiles and building A-bombs.

It is arguable that narco terrorists are controlling the governments of Mexico, Bolivia and Myanmar in Asia.

The tribal warfare atrocities of West Africa are devastating the continent.

Natural disaster, tsunamis and earthquakes and drouth for example, are killing thousands and the earth is warming at an alarming rate.

It seems we have ad hoc responses across the globe, but the finite choices principle I’ve enunciated above seems also to argue that we have only one foreign policy and that it is an integrated and integral part of our overall governing philosophy.  We make choices that determine our priorities both at home and abroad.

As ethereal as these choices may seem, I’ll remind you that the consequence of America’s foreign policy choices is driving up the price of gasoline as you read this.  You may think that good or bad, but it certainly affects your everyday life.  The value of your work can be expressed in the price of a shirt at Target and that is a function of the value of the American dollar expressed in China’s Yuan.  It is one world.  A global market means that what you buy and what you sell and what you earn depends on what is going on in the world and how America is responding to and/or shaping those events.

What do you think would happen if, instead of being in Iraq in 2007, we spent $200 Billion having the military install wind power generators and photoelectric cell panels in the desert of Arizona and Nevada?

How would things be different if we thought about where we wanted to be and where we wanted the world to be in a hundred years instead of next year or next week?

I’m feeling a little funky today.

Don’t much want to talk about politics on a Friday and I don’t have all that much of a social life from this past week to talk about.

I was delighted to hear from my friend DeShan that she decided to stay in town rather than go to Australia, but then I heard she’d been assaulted by some guy and was badly hurt.  I don’t know the 411 on the deal, but I’m distressed to think about sweet DeShan being hurt.

I am so broke, I can’t pay attention and I mean that literally.  I can’t seem to pay attention to my billing chores or to my main business either because I’m so twisted up over money.  One of my sister’s 5 Rules for Divorced Women says:  If his money is messed up, his life is messed up.  Seems to be true for her brother and maybe it’s true for all potential boyfriends.  Girls?  Have any stories or experiences?

I think 3:40 a.m. McArp’s depression is rubbing off on me.  There is a big part of me that wants to curl up into a fetal ball and go catatonic so no one can mess with me.  That is depression, isn’t it?  I mean, fuck monastaries and caves.  I want a padded room and good drugs.  And, no, dzaster, it isn’t ennui.  I’m bored with ennui.  And fuck the French and their language anyway.

I keep missing privacy shattered Sharon.  She’s in town and wants to go to lunch and I’m in Ardmore.  I want to take her to lunch and she’s in Bumfuck Egypt.  What’s a nice Jewish girl like her doing in Egypt anyway?  Doesn’t she know … well, of course, she knows.  Well, she might not know, she’s a little bit dotty …  No, … uhm …  well, anyway … .

Speaking of Sharons, Sonic Sharon was at a party I went to last weekend and she got everyone up on their feet dancing by getting up herself and flat hitting it hard.  She was SO good!  She got that moneymaker movin’ and the rest of us just couldn’t stay in our seats.  It was the highlight of the evening.  That boy she keeps being seen with — just to make ME jealous, I might add (LOL) — is a lucky guy.

The movie Wednesday was The Three Burials of Melaquides Estrada, directed and starring Tommy Lee Jones.  Very good.  Beautiful depiction of the Big Bend country of Texas and northern Mexico.  Lots of local color and colorful characters.  I recommend it.

Had a long talk with the lucky Veronique Mist the other day.  I sure do like that girl, even if she’s the darkest person I’ve ever been close to.  Death and decay delight her.  She revels in the thought of her own demise.  She really does think today would be a good day to die.  Her fondest wish is to be an unsolved murder victim.  Anyway, we both agreed that we were going to die alone and unloved and unmourned — at least that was what was going to happen in our deepest fears.  In the meantime, however, it is irritating as hell trying to find love on the internet.  The problem is that you get on the internet because you can’t find anyone you’re interested in dating and/or you haven’t met anyone who is interested in you.  Trouble is, everyone on the internet is there for the same reasons.  They are too picky to want you or they are so desperate they want anyone.  Anyway, I told her I’d looked at 1,000 photos of women aged 40-60 within 50 miles of me in OKC and there were only 8 photos that prompted me to look at their profiles, much less want to contact and date them.  She said I was lucky to find that many and that among men on the internet where she was looking, she couldn’t find one in 1,000.  Of course, she wasn’t searching.  She was just going through the 1,000 suitors who’d filled her inbox with lavish praise for her beauty.  Different deal altogether, if you ask me.  My sister in S.C. says she showed my picture to one of her grrrls and was told I am HOT.  Great.  A woman thinks I’m hot, but she’s 2,000 miles across the country.  At least I’m going to S.C. in December to see my niece get married, maybe I can meet the woman of my dreams then.  Then again, maybe not.  I sort of realized over the past couple of days since talking to Ms.Mist that I just may be fooling myself.  I don’t want to have to clean the house and turn down the stereo and stop eating over the sink and drinking milk out of the carton.  I have the sense most women would object to some of these endearing habits of mine.  I may be better off in the dark alone in my padded cell than with a serious relationship.  It’s too hot to cuddle anyway.

Don’t anyone say a single word to me about Clerks II, the new Kevin Smith movie, until I’ve seen it.  I will kill you.  I mean it.

SO DID I!!!

I spent some time Tuesday night with my favorite jazz bassist, Shy Oren, at the G Spot talking about Palestine.

First, I wanted to know if his family in Israel was safe and so far they are.

It’s rather difficult for me to imagine his situation.  His parents and siblings are within range of the Hezbollah rockets coming from Lebanon.  Like all Israelis, Shy has been in the Army — everyone serves their country in Israel.   (I sometimes think that would be a good idea for us, other times I think it makes a country militaristic).

His take on the homeland is that the Israelis are very united and angry.  They feel they tried land for peace and it didn’t work, he says.  He believes Israel will militarily establish a zone in southern Lebanon that is free of Arab arms and that seems clear at this point — telephone calls, taped, are being made by Israel to all phones in southern Lebanon telling common citizens to evacuate.   

Shy also believes there will be an Israeli invasion of Syria, retaking the Golan Heights, and that Israel will try to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities as they did in the 80s when they bombed Sadaam’s Iraqi nuke plant.

Gaza will be subdued by force.  Hamas will no longer have any military power because their gunmen will be killed.

This is, of course, a recipe for a world war.

Islamic gunmen are taking over Somalia.  The Taliban has renewed strength in the south of Afghanistan.  The Iraqi insurgency is killing at a faster pace than ever in Iraq.

Lest we forget, there are also Islamic states in the south of what was the Soviet empire — the “stans”, where American and other European powers massed for the invasion of Kabul.  Those places have Islamic insurgencies that strike at Russia from time to time with Chechnya the focal point.

One of the things Shy and I discussed is that the press in America is very very different in its coverage than the free press in Europe and the rest of the world.  Frankly, if all you read is American newspapers and/or the American television news, you are not getting the same ideas of what is happening as is the rest of the world.

I don’t believe in an American Mainstream Media cabal or conspiracy,  but the view of the world being presented at present is skewed. 

American support of the Israeli prosecution of this military action is very dangerous.  After Clinton worked very hard to gain Arab and Islamic respect by backing Muslims in the Balkans against the Christian Serbs led by Milosovec, Arabs now believe America is captured by its Israeli paymasters.  Yes, that’s an anti-Semetic view of the world.

For America, I think part of the problem, a big part of the problem, is that this Administration and a large portion of the American population is simplistic in their worldview.

And, it’s the most un-Christian foreign policy I can imagine.

Not all problems can be solved by American arms.  A gun does not solve all disputes and a bomb is not the best answer to every disagreement.

We have a man in the White House who professes to be a “born-again” Christian.  He’s backed by a third of the voting population that identifies itself as “evangelical” or “religious”.

Why do we have a foreign policy that is based on the idea that America is a hegemon and can force by arms its will on the world?

Why are we condoning torture and kidnapping?

Why do we applaud tanks and airstrikes?

What is Christian about that?

“What would Jesus do?” is no mystery.  It’s in the New Testament plain as day.  Jesus would turn the other cheek, love his neighbor and forgive seven times seventy seven.  When the Centurian in the Garden of Gesthsemene had his ear cut off while coming to arrest Jesus, Christ healed him and admonished his disciples for turning to violence.

I understand the Israelis.  God is pretty much a tough military leader in the Old Testament.  Once, an angel (presumably, the Archangel Michael) with a fiery sword slew 10,000 enemies in their tents in a single night.  that’s a heckuva massacre, even by today’s standards.  don’t mess with God’s chosen people.

Meanwhile, back in the real world of today, you’ve got a sliver of the American population who are hoping that this will all turn into Armagedden so they can rapture up to heaven.

You can bet there are Arabs who are burnishing that quote from Bush back around 9/11 when he called the War on Terror a “crusade”.  You may recall, as do Arabs, that the crusades were not a good time for MidEast-European diplomatic ties.

I hope you also recall that the Arabs kicked Europe’s ass.  Jeruselem fell and just about the time Columbus was taking off for America, the Arab world took Constaninople.

Damascus is a far far older city than London or Paris and Baghdad is the traditional site of the Garden of Eden.

Frankly, I think America is in over our collective heads.

Bush’s idea of Arab democracy lacks two things:  an appreciation of the need for stability for a democracy to work; and, he forgot that the Arab world did not have the Englightenment, as did Washington and Jefferson and Madison.

He’s forgotten our Christian ideals.

And, this President has no respect for anyone with a differing view.

It is a prescription for disaster.

So, put those vacation plans on hold and cut up your credit cards because gasoline is about to go to $5-6 per liter (not gallon).  You won’t be able to afford to heat and cool your house this winter and next summer.  Do yourself a favor and buy a bicycle and a cord of wood if you’ve got a fireplace.

I’m very pessimistic, can you tell?