the green room pub and other thoughts

February 28th, 2006

Last night I was visiting my favorite local establishments here in Northwest Portland, the Green Room Pub. This joint is my kind of place, and I guess it would be what the barflies call “my local”, assuming I understand the nomenclature properly.

I mostly go for the music, particularly Monday nights, which feature both a very popular open mike, and dollar pints of Miller High Life. Hard to beat that. The only thing that really gets me down is the damn cigarette smoke, since everybody and their dog seems to smoke. Granted, I smoked on and off for twenty years. But now that I’ve been done with that for awhile, my lungs tend to object, as does my poor pterygium. Yeah, that’s gross.

But hey, it’s all worth it for some good tunes, and good tunes are to be had at open mike night at the Green Room, not to mention arcane learning experiences. Last night, for instance, I learned that dragsters are fueled entirely by ethanol, have eight thousand horse power engines, and can accelerate faster than most jet airplanes. That’s just downright amazing. Also, their engines must be rebuilt after only about a minute of actual use, at a cost of up to $350,000. And I thought cocaine was an expensive hobby!

Now, had I not ventured down to the pub last night and met Ted, the gap toothed fellow who imparted this information, I might still not be aware of these facts. I’d still be living in ignorance, blissfully unaware of the complexities of drag racing. Ted and I also discussed our preferences in whiskey (Ted’s a Jack Daniels man), God, grandparents, home remodeling, and many of the people singing, among other subjects.

Some of the people playing were quite good, too. It’s always inspiring to me to see folks get up on stage and perform for a bunch of strangers for no other reason than to do so. It almost re-instills my faith in mankind. Perhaps someday I’ll even get up there and contribute my own special brand of twangy, twelve bar blues. Probably not though, unless I can find a cool front to play harmonica and sing. Singing and playing just ain’t my forte.

Earlier this afternoon I was down at the bookstore and I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s latest, A Man Without a Country. By “picked up”, I mean I picked it up and read it in the store for thirty or forty minutes, not that I actually paid for it and brought it home. I mean, it costs twenty-three dollars, and it’s a thin little book with large print. Kurt’s got plenty of money already, and I read half of it in that short time. Plus, let’s face it, I’m a cheap bastard.

The book reminded me why I’ve always loved Vonnegut, and why he used to provide so much solace from the bleak depression I often felt in my teenage years. Nobody does ironic, world-weary yet kindly insight into the human condition like Kurt.

From the sound of this book, however, he’s all but given up on the human race. Can’t blame him really. He observes that this country, and hence the world, is being run by a bunch of psychopaths and “guessers”. The latter is my favorite observation, drawing a parallel between deranged morons such as Donald Rumsfeld, and surgeons in the last century who mocked Louis Pasteur for his suggestion that they might wash their hands before performing surgery.

But it seems even the snake oil salesmen and women have inherent limits in their ability to cuckold the public. Even the usual host of pseudo-intellectual popinjays, such as William F. Buckley and Andrew Sullivan, are being forced to admit that the war in Iraq is a complete disaster, about to become a full blown civil war, and, gee whiz, maybe the invasion wasn’t such a smart idea after all.

Golly boys, aren’t you lucky we’re not in any danger of actually losing the war and having to surrender to Iraq? Otherwise, you and your ilk might end up being tried for war crimes and having your necks stretched by a tribunal of Shia holy men. I guess it’s good to be an American, all safe and comfy, far away from any of that icky death and destruction stuff.

Actually, to be fair, neither of these twats really admit to the fundamental insanity of killing hundreds of thousands of people, and destroying a country in order to save it, deliver it from the horror of Saddam and into the warm embrace of western style democracy. No, Sullivan prefers to blame Rumsfeld for the failure of this otherwise noble cause, while Buckley points to more general failings of the post war operation.

What these codependent enablers fail to address is their own complicity in the whole fiasco. I guess I was lucky enough to be ignorant of foreign policy nuance back in 2003, and had to rely on my gut instinct and common sense to smell a rat. Now these two world class “guessers” get to explain away their own abysmal judgement, and chastise psychopaths like Rumsfeld for mere errors in judgement. Let’s face it, boys. If you couldn’t tell the people selling this war to begin with were psychopaths, then you obviously aren’t observant or insightful enough to write a sports column for a small town weekly, much less preen and prattle on national television.

But, as they say, nobody ever went broke over-estimating the human capacity for self-delusion. Alas, none of the psychopaths will ever be tried for war crimes. Andy and Bill will never visit an Iraqi hospital, and see the tiny torsoes of limbless brown children they helped to create. The American taxpayer will foot the two trillion odd dollar bill for this shit, and life will go on. Except that now, life is far more dangerous and less secure here in the US of A, as Katrina so aptly demonstrated. Incompetence has a price, and sometimes it’s higher than merely having to try to save face with finger pointing and half assed mea culpas.

As for me, perhaps I’ll go check out the Green Room again. Tonight’s the Portland Songwriter’s Classic. That sounds like a lot more fun than reading Andrew Sullivan, or listening, as I just heard on NPR, to Generalisimo Bush appealing to the Iraqis’ sense of “unity”. Now that’s just priceless. John Stewart couldn’t write that shit if he tried.


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