ON THE ROAD WITH JACK KEROUAC IN TYLER, TEXAS

Hello, anybody!? I'm in Tyler, Texas at the University of Texas at Tyler Student Center. A beautiful campus, all yellow brick buildings and green lawns. Hot and overcast. The tornados that struck on Saturday struck north of me. Humid too, after days in desert and high country of Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The old feeling I recall of the South: that the average Southern women look tired, beat down and disgusted and the beautiful ones have that desperate look in their eyes, behind the fake smiles. Then there are the fed up women, the truly intelligent ones, the feminists, who are either riding around on the backs of Hells Angels' bikes or tied up with future Charlie Mansons in self-destructive patterns of behavior, or gay. It's a rare, intelligent Southern woman who can ever find herself within the short span of her life and become truly self-activated.

A nurse I knew from Mobile, Alabama once told me that half the women who came into her emergency ward were having psychosomatic heart attacks. It was the only way they knew to get attention.


THE ABUSED ABUSER

If you can get a copy of The New Yorker Magazine for May 26, 2003, you'll get a good picture of a conservative, a man who hasn't faced the abuse in his own family and so can't stand those who have dealt with their issues. Many psychologists will tell you that a man who hasn't dealt with the abuse in his family is likely to be very attached to them and to cling to abusive authority and so become abusive himself, i.e. conservative. Roger Ailes, the Fox news head and right wing mouth piece and Bush apologist is profiled in an article in that New Yorker.

Of Nixon, Ailes says, "He was socially uncomfortable. [Today] he would be allowed to go on Oprah and plead that he was an abused child. And the liberals would love him!" See Ailes' inability to get the point? Instead of honoring a man who might be willing to find out what really makes him tick, Ailes mocks him, because Ailes is not able to deal with his own insides.

Of his mother, Ailes fondly says, "You couldn't please her." Man, does he hear what he says? See, he really doesn't hear what he's saying. At age eight, Roger was hit by a car and had to learn to use his legs again. His father took him to a track to practice walking. Once when Roger fell into a pile of manure, his kindly dad, said, "Don't fall down and you won't get that crap on you." His father blamed his children for his life of toil and later abandoned them.

There is so much revealed in the article that Ailes doesn't want to deal with so, of course, he hates men who are willing to face the deepest emotions they feel. Such self knowledge frightens the hell out of conservatives like Ailes. He'd rather face a bullet and die than face himself. Which is why so many conservatives are in the military.

PS: How did I come across this old New Yorker? I got a sinus infection on the way to Tucson. Went to a urgent care center and found the old mag. there. Tore out the pages while waiting for the doc to come give me an RX for anti-bio.

SHOCK AND AWESOMER

Let me restate something which I don't like to think, but there it is, in my head. Americans speak of shock and awe and come up with simplistic, stupid ideas like that, because they're not in touch with reality. To us, shock and awe is throwing bombs long distances and rolling over opponents with the military superiority of tanks and guns and helicopters.

The Iraqis are our modern indians. Remember all the western stuff about savages who tied their opponents over ant hills to let them die tortured by sun and nature? Scalping, recall that? We're on Bush's crusade to tame these savages and give them the American way of life. Have we heard this before? It's called Manifest Destiny. Look it up.

So we "shock and awe" our the Davids with our giant war machine, and so the little Davids fight back with sticks and stones and slingshots. They cut off heads, and we act "shocked!" Isn't that we meant to do to them? Shock them? Didn't we call our little blitzkrieg "shock and awe?" So why are we shocked that they would do something to "shock" us? Lot's of hypocrisy here, folks. If you ask me, we were out-shocked and now we bitch and moan.


ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Near noon. Took me all morning to drive the 323 loop around Tyler and find the campus. Then I had problems getting this computer to work since I'm a Mac-eral myself. Now it's time to head across Louisiana to Vicksburg, Miss., then down along the Mississippi River into New Orleons where I hope I can find money enough to eat a meal at Fitzgerald's. I will have crossed the Mississippi in at least five different places in my life when I cross at Vicksburg, site of Grants great victory over the Confederates with siege tactics.

Pardon any errors. I was dizzy and felt out of place this morning.