Author Archive for M. Toole
THE ADVENTURES OF AMAX AND GANDHI
Part XXVII
“The Ghost Dancer of Washington Gulch”
Special appearance by Lightnin’ as Public Input
The scene: The Red Lady access road off Kebler Pass
Thingfish: Why wouldn’t you want us to mine molly, Mr. Gandhi? You know that mining interests are respected corporations that simply seek to improve the lives of us all without commitments or emotional baggage down the road.
Gandhi: Like a soul? It is immoral to scratch and dig on Pachamama, my son.
Thingfish: As superintendent of this shootin’ match its immoral if we don’t show a profit and placate our stockholders.
Gandhi: Many of your stockholders are already rich. Why do they want to level a beautiful mountain to enhance their fortunes?
Kingfish: Oddly enough the molybdenum we pull out of Red Lady’s guts will build mountain bikes for mindless recreationalists and tennis racquets for the idle rich…but that’s really not the point, Mr. Gandhi. The point is jobs. Jobs!
Enter Momma (the High Country Citizen’s Alliance spokesperson) and her daughter Sapphire, who among other accomplishments has been a questionable marriage to Thingfish.
Gandhi: Jobs, is it? That’s what the British said when they invaded India in the Eighteenth Century, and at least they built good roads.
Momma: They won’t come in here and mine. We’ll kick them out one way of the other like we did in the late 70s. Right over might! We’ll put signs up all over town and have a dance and…
Sapphire: Now, momma, mining might not be so bad. It’s progress like those Habitat shacks and Wal-Mart and the new City Market in Gunnison. It’s sure to help trailer sales and increase the tin building ratio from here to Saguache.
Momma: And the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel…What we need is a vigil…or maybe a hootenanny. That’s it. People will respond to this crisis. The people won’t let Amax come in. We’ll pool our funds and…set up another green belt, or maybe a conservancy.
Gandhi: Hold your horses, momma. Get real. The only way to defeat these molly mongers is by nonviolent resistance. It worked in India. It reminds me of a dream I once had while traveling by rail from Durban to Cape Town.
Thingfish: Will this take long? I’ve got work to do. Water rights are a very lengthy and messy business.
Gandhi: Once upon my dream there was plenty to eat and life was good. Then one day the caliph decided that he wanted to have more than everyone else. He called it divine right and said he deserved more due to his station as ruler of the land. He began to eat…and eat…and eat. After a short while the poorest of the peasants, who had been getting by all right, began to see a shortage of food. Soon he had none. The caliph told him to be patient, that he would be better off as a result of the redistribution of provisions. Things got worse. Their livestock starved. Soon the merchant class was hungry, then the nobility. In a matter of one year, the caliph had grown fat while the landscape was barren. No one had the energy to work the fields and grow food. After a while even the caliph was hungry. Soon the people had killed all the wild animals for food and were forced to return to their ancient origins in the sea where they were quickly devoured by giant fish who had never heard my story.
Thingfish: What’s your point, Mr. Gandhi?
Gandhi: My point, Mr. Thingfish, is that no mater how you attempt to rationalize it some things are just wrong…like tearing down a beautiful mountain to make fat men in some East Coast boardroom rich. Then, to complicate matters there is the impact on the lives of the people already living nearby.
Thingfish: What’s the matter with our plan for “The Last Great Mining Town in the West”? They’ll be jobs, and well…jobs…
Momma: And traffic congestion and all the social ills that go with booms. Then one day Amax will have had enough and they will move to the next slaughter zone, leaving behind an evil legacy for our children to clean up.
Thingfish: Now momma, Amax is a responsible, environmentally sound corporation.
Momma: What about Climax?
Thingfish:….Moly…That was then, this is now.
Sapphire: I liked Mr. Gandhi’s dream. Can I buy it on cassette? I want to find out what happened to the caliph?
Momma: Sapphire, honey, Mr. Gandhi’s dream was just a metaphor like skier days, bronze passes, trophy homes and tailings ponds. Now where did I leave my monkey wrench?
Continued sooner than we’d like
Journal, Post and News Plan Joint Military Exercises
(Tucson) The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Fox News have announced joint military exercises to be carried out before the summer. In a show of strength, empire builder Rupert Murdoch will parade his Australian news holdings, which account for 70% of the newspapers in the country, along with the Big Three.
The military exercises are primarily a reminder of the power of the Murdoch Empire that has misinformed millions according to critics. Perhaps the most juvenile of all newscasts, seen daily on Fox News, reaches an estimated one million households. It’s no wonder Americans can’t find Iran on a map of the world. The New York Post, the poorly written, redheaded stepchild of Gotham journalism, is still an also-ran with the Wall Street Journal maintaining its pompous gray, moderate glow for now.
News Corporation, owner of the media mentioned, will showcase undocumented, opinion missiles capable of hitting the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle from off-shore accounts and observation points at the tops of skyscrapers owned by the Murdoch group. A planned amphibious operation was cancelled due to bad weather and replaced with a feature on carpet bombing, co-produced with Better Homes and Gardens, a publication reportedly on Murdoch’s radar.
“The bilateral military exercises are not war games, as our dwindling list of competitors alleges,” said Herm Fleshander, a Murdoch executive familiar with the blow by blow since the early rounds of dialogue on the action. “We are simply testing headline defense systems. There is nothing provocative about these games unless of corpse Mr. Murdoch shows up in short shorts!” he laughed.
News Corporation owns 800 companies in some 50 countries with an estimated worth at $5 billion. The media group seeks to control what people think and thus manipulate the population regarding its political agenda. Despite indictments for telephone hacking and one-sided reporting the entire Murdoch Empire is fiscally untouchable.
“This is what happens when there is invisible control and no competition in many markets across the globe,” said one reporter from the Miami Herald. Murdoch’s staff pushes his priorities while “Murdoch’s money speaks for itself. Efforts like these have destroyed the labor unions and are crushing the middle class turning a vast segment of Americans into paupers, serfs in their own country.”
Despite lame attempts by the FCC to limit multiple ownership of media in specific markets, the trend appears to favor large conglomerates acquiring more and more. Soon they are force-feeding the pabulum of fear and distrust to a jaded, cockamamie, television-loving American nation with its fast food and Bud Lite mentality.
But perhaps these propagandizing harlequins have even outdone themselves with a news piece stating that Rupert Murdoch will live forever. While butting up to immortality may seem preposterous, it is right in line with most of the other information, disguised as true journalism, on the menu at the Murdoch banquet. – Suzie Compost
Obese Americans to Sit on Syria, Iran
(Washington) America’s severely obese, not yet recognized as a distinct socio-species but growing in that direction, could be the secret weapon employed to control future violence and chaos in the Mideast.
According to sources in the Obama Administration many of “our pathetically fat” will be encouraged to volunteer for a different kind of sit-in this fall – plopping down on rogue states.
“We all remember growing up as kids under the threat of a fat person sitting on us,” said Sal Flaco, originator of the idea. “All we have done here is bundle up these actions, these fears, these legions of obesity and send them, and not our soldiers, to troubled regions around the world.”
Flaco went on to say that there is nothing in the Bible or Koran that talks about fat people because there were most likely not very many of them running around in the Semitic deserts at the time these books were penned. (Maybe even some bought into the concept of the body as a Temple of the Holy Spirit and kept the weight off as a spiritual exercise.)
“Living on dates, camel milk and an occasional lamb won’t put on many calories,” he said. “People were too busy trying to survive to experience the luxury of gaining a little paunch (affluent flesh). In our society, on the other hand, people are told that it is OK to be obese. There are TV shows featuring obese people and fat is projected as normal. They, too, eat fast food and drink soda pop and are a mess just like their viewers.”
If this plan is adopted as an integral part of the various sanctions imposed, we will soon see hordes of obese Americans making unselfish, patriotic sacrifices for their country. Experts say that after a few months sitting on rogue nations and eating the local cuisine, most of the obese will shed pounds as a secondary benefit.
When asked if many heavy Americans had already volunteered Flaco admitted that the program was off to a rocky start.
“First we will have to set up reeducation camps to convince these people that they need to lose weight,” he explained. “There will be no fast food, soda, beer or other foods high in calories. There will be daily exercise. There will be healthy meals. Once our fat people see the benefits we feel that they will be more likely to volunteer for duty in the Mideast so as to keep the weight off.”
Traditional allies were quick to point out that the plan, although heartless and discriminatory, might work.
“Even with the sauces of France and the sausages of Germany the US leads in obesity levels,” said one Belgian dietician. “In England the food is so bad that no one gets chronically plump but there are surprisingly some overweight too.”
“Be that as it may,” said one Congressman who voted for the plan. “Sit on them long enough and these outlaw nations will cave in to the pressure and fly right. We will target leaders, logistical military areas, strategic political groups, water sources, and nuclear facilities.”
An initial plan, which called for the dropping of fast food and soda pop onto offending countries, was scrapped Friday as human rights groups screamed bloody murder.
“That is nothing short of culinary genocide,” said Patsy B. Patsy, Executive Director of Amnesty Interchangeable. “We are so concerned and exited that we are coining new socio-economic terminologies to combat that potential strike.”
Meanwhile King Obama has yet to release plans for the remainder of the region but experts have predicted that fat teams will be sent to Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iraq before the year is up.
“Things are looking peachy in Jordan, and Turkey is coming around,” said a spokesman for the White House. Now if we could just get Detroit and Philadelphia to follow suit we’d be somewhere.” – Suzie Compost
PAPER TO BROADCAST DAWN TO DUSK
(Liberty City) Despite the forced adherence to Daylight Savings Time and its inborn social ills, the San Juan Horseshoe newspaper will transmit stories while the affects of the sun are evident. Departing from the mainstream nine to five genre, the publication seeks to expand readership and increase advertising revenue while lowering electric bills.
“We don’t care what time the feds say it may be,” said Susie Compost, an under-editor at the paper. “We just take a break from our typing and look up at the sky to decide when we should eat, sleep and perform cutting edge investigative journalistic feats with lasting ramifications for a healthy compendium of prototypical paragons deemed imperative for enduring cultural progression.”
Although the Federal Communications Commission has been mute regarding this break from customary procedure, insiders expect the new guidelines to be implemented without interference.
“We will not see-saw, teeter or vacillate when it comes to the fabrication of the news,” said Compost, who still flaunts a box of 120 color crayons in her top desk drawer. “Rain or shine our readers can expect full coverage through the daylight hours and welcome quiet during the subsequent dark periods.
The Horseshoe remains the only newspaper in the Free World that watches the clock in this manner, offering the complimentary dawn to dusk service 365 days of the year. The Juneau What, its Alaskan mentor, began publishing a popular Midnight Sun Edition for insomniacs in 1989. Research suggests that Giant of Sheep Creek Newspapers, continues to pull operational and human resource strings, stretching deep into the Rockies.
– One-Tooth McCabre
Survey Error Discovered at Four Corners
(Cortez-BSNS) A team of geographers working for National Geographic Magazine has stumbled across a survey error of major significance here. The experts, comprised of elite scientists from regional academic institutions, were busy plotting the romantic relationship between Dominguez and Escalante, when the foul-up became apparent.
While studying environmental impact statements issued between 1868 and 1879, the scientists noticed a serious discrepancy in survey data that has resulted in the improper division of states at the Four Corners Monument.
The discovery is expected to have frightening impact on the lives of millions of Americans. While Democrats and Republicans blame each other for the mishap the federals are calling for an independent panel to sort out the confusion and get the topographical train back on its tracks.
Preliminary reports indicate that if you currently lived in Montrose you will now live in St Petersburg, Florida. If you lived in Crested Butte your new domicile is Stone Mountain, Georgia. If you live in Silverton you now live somewhere in Canada while former residents of Ridgway will get their mail in Uzbekistan.
Other changes will be announced as they emerge. We are sorry to be the bearer of bad news as far as private property laws and gerrymandering.
