Michael & me

“A man once said that the pinnacle of success is when you’ve finally lost interest, in money, compliments, and publicity.”—Todd Snider

I am an American.

And I believe.

I believe that Sasquatch is an ape, jet flyovers over the stadium were put there by God, God is umm, not sure . . . Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy, George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and something about the moon.

Not really. Not necessarily.

I believe that what Americans need though is a saying, something to summarize, to protect, to help us get through.

Italian Literary Park Ranger.

That’s not it. Those are my mind notes I keep repeating as Ruth and I walk through Central Park.

Yes, we went to New York, drove out of the woods of northern Minnesota to Minneapolis and were outta here, because it was time.

While I’m walking and gawking in Central Park I’m making notes in my head because I have no paper and it would be weird to write down shit all the time. I just keep repeating the words in my head and maybe I’ll remember. “Italian” because I’ve never heard Italian live before and I say something stupid to Ruth about Italians looking normal until you hear them talk. “Literary” because we go down Literary Way and I want my statue to be there. “Park Ranger” because there is a guy sitting in the park wearing a big UFO hat who told us where the restrooms were, and I think I can find some way to put Park Ranger into this. So, sometimes all the notes you keep in your heard are stupid and when you get back to paper you just let it go. Because it’s stupid.

We Americans do think funny things, weird things. Maybe Italians and Chinese and others do, too, but it’s harder to tell. We believe in Lake Wobegon, for one thing, or we want to, we really want to.

We have lots of sayings, funny things that we believe, in which we base whole lives in.

Anyway, it was time, time to leave Minnesota.

The Duluth Public Library could not find my Wisconsin beer box of books I had brought in and offered to the library to put into circulation. The fiction editor had turned them down and now I was there to pick up the box, but it couldn’t be found.

And it was time to leave because it was time to get off the damn computer, wow, you do know what I’m talking about?

And it was time to go to a dive bar in Brooklyn. That’s what really sounded like fun to me.

We went for a walk in Central Park because it was close and it’s Central Park. And we found out that Michael Moore has a show on Broadway. We had already planned to see The Book of Mormon, but that was another night. We checked the prices and found tickets and there we were.

Michael Moore has a Broadway show and the Duluth Public Library can’t find my beer box of books. I think MM and I could have been buddies, journalistas chasing down the bad guys, Michael & Me [but mostly me], but so far that has not worked out.

It was time to leave Minnesota because I was done writing, it was not working, and there was nothing else to do and maybe there is something to do in New York, probably not, but maybe.

It was time to leave Minnesota because I had read in the Duluth Reader how Garrison Keillor, who calls himself The Old Scout, believes that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. Keillor is considered by many to be the most urbane, erudite, sophisticated, educated tall person in a state of people who mostly consider themselves urbane, tall, erudite, sophisticated.

And me, I, who am short, working relentlessly on the self-improvement program that is destined to fail the moment I stop pedaling, while on the bike, sweating, watching the TV on the bike, also watched Keillor along with Walter Mondale talking on an erudite Minnesota television program about how “the plane that hit the Pentagon,” and how 9/11 was basically a failure in foresight and planning.

These are not stupid men, presumably. They are too tall and wearing suits and they are on TV and people know their names—and they know full well how their bread is buttered and by whom. They also did not say boo or you betcha when their fellow Minnesotan, Paul Wellstone, was murdered for having questioned the official 9/11 story.

These elder Minnesota statesmen will not be placing in jeopardy their pre-punched tickets to the White House Camo Ball. They are already wearing their camo coats, socks, and presumably, camo underwear, ready to toast whatever rite of further passage is en vogue and get on with the rest of their lives.

And it was time because it was our 36th anniversary. Ruth and I had been to New York eleven years before with the kids, and I had been there right after I fled the seminary in Saint Paul after meeting Dan Berrigan because it was not radical enough, to join the New York City Catholic Worker, and I had been there later, on a book tour, in an elderly tan Toyota, to read at Bluestockings, on Allen Street, to absolutely nobody.

It was time to leave, at least for a week, because the MinnPost in Minneapolis and The Indypendent in New York had both turned down my idea to write a column to show Garrison Keillor what he could be if he were to be all he can be: The News From Moon Rock Lake, Minnesota.

I spend parts of my days searching for Sasquatch and writing books and I think you can imagine how after a long summer or winter or both, how you might feel the zeitgeist pushing down on your head and the back of your neck as you sink to the bottom.

During the stay-over in Minneapolis we walked around Uptown, by the lake, by Magers & Quinn where I had given a reading maybe ten years ago to a tiny crowd of crazy people. On the way, a black man on the corner whispers to me, “do you like poetry?”

WTF?

Well, yeah, I said, but I don’t, not really. But he showed guts. I had no money and I just patted him on the shoulder to be encouraging.

I said to Ruth, “Wow, selling poetry on the corner.”

I looked for the perfect book for the trip but didn’t find it because it’s not there.

We did get change and I hustled back to the corner to give the hearty black man his due, a soggy five-dollar bill. Couldn’t see him, maybe down this street, this one?

And then, there he was. I knew he would be so happy.

“I usually get fifteen, but I’ll take ten.”

Oh.

If only I had the fortitude to sell my books on the corner to unsuspecting tourists, we might get to New York more often.

I have so many notes here, so many things to tell you about our trip! Like the selfies in Central Park and Times Square! There’s the Jewish family sitting right by us on the plane, so loving, happy. Wow. Headed to a wedding in Madrid and later I wonder if Barcelona is anywhere near Madrid.

On the plane . . . did you know that one copy of The Atlantic costs over nine dollars in the Minneapolis airport? I don’t think I’ve ever read it. It sounds fresh, water, sea air, like that.

And there’s this article that I think I might like, by Kurt Anderson, “How America Lost Its Mind.” A perfect round-up piece for a trip on the zeitgeist where you can get things all figured out and come back energized and smarter. It’s long and there’s a full-page drawing of screaming, angry protesters and UFOs and Bigfoot and Hippies, and I identify with at least some of that, but I see he’s pointing a finger and it looks like it’s, right at me. Yep.

“Before the internet, crackpots [me] were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternative realities [lack of self-confidence, I get it]. Now their opinions are all over the airwaves and the web, just like actual news. Now all of the fantasies look real.”

And so, I read this while we wait for the Jewish family to board, and CNN is blaring in my one ear and it’s raining a little and I’m just looking around and noticing, people, and what they do, how we are. There’s a lot of phones. I knew that, but wow, a lot.

I’m happy, kind of, for the trip. I miss my computer, wish my novels were selling or at least being read, wish I were the Voinovich of America, but I’m all right, I’ll be okay, this will be fun. The TSA wasn’t that bad. I had dreams of shouting, “9/11 was an inside job, capture and jail George W. Bush! This is all because of a lie! Blah! Blah! Blah!”

But you don’t.

Nobody does.

But I don’t really like to fly. But I’ll do it.

And so, yeah, while I’m watching the Jewish family get all settled and pass around the food they have brought for the trip, no, I’m fine, thank you though, I read a little more and figure this guy in the expensive magazine is wrong or he’s CIA, but that is exactly what he would expect me to think. And he’s CIA. By the time we start going, geezuz god, hold on, are we moving? I understand, because I have to figure this out. I have to know. And I understand that just to have this nine-dollar Kurt Anderson talking about these things means “we” and we know who we are, don’t we, are winning. When you are losing “they” don’t talk about “you,” at all. Not one fucking bit.

I take a breath and read about Stephen Colbert and truthiness and how Anderson is in favor and it all intertwines, the revolutionary Colbert who trolled Bush in terrible times at the White House Press Corps dinner now has his own giant show and giant Times Square exploding billboards and he is now the man.

We land, the Jewish family goes its way. We don’t say goodbye, we were never really that close. Ruth and I take Lyft, something new for us, through Harlem into Manhattan and the Hampton Inn on 8th Avenue. And then Central Park, then Michael Moore tickets at the vendor a few blocks south for half-price.

And Michael Moore is just so excited about the Democrats.

I don’t get it. I ran for office as a Democrat in Iowa in 2000, for the U.S. House of Representatives, 5th District. I had no job except my paper route. I was an unpublished writer, not even self-published yet and I delivered the Sioux City Journal every morning. We had no money, no support, but I remembered John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and I thought being a Democrat could mean being for some pretty cool things, like being against war, against poverty, for the truth, all these great things. I actually won the primary and in the general election I received 65,500 votes, in an ultra-conservative district, without any help whatsoever from the Democratic Party.

Anyway.

Moore wants people to get excited about adding to their morning routine a call to Congress. WTF? A call to Congress? Didn’t the Democrats just have eight fucking years? I’m repeating all these words in my head to remember until we get back to the room after two amazing stout beers at The House of Brews: buried at sea? Boston? Sandy Hook? Are you kidding me? Drones, no health care, military bases overseas, Oswald still packaged and sold as the lynchpin of the culture. OMG, I write that, but I didn’t think I would type it, but man, wow.

And I suppose we didn’t go to the moon, either? You ever hear that from Uncle John the military vet at Thanksgiving Dinner when you bring up Kennedy, King, Building 7?

And you shut the fuck up because you are supposed to shut the fuck up. And so people not only my age, but my children’s age and on down the line are in the midst of living entire lives based in the minutiae of what it takes to hold on to a job, a place to live, to eat, to have a good time.

But it’s not really living.

We have learned how to get through this next long hour, this morning, this day, this next week, this presidential administration, another one, and now, here we sit, in the Belasco Theater watching 63-year-old Michael Moore on stage, under the watchful eyes of ushers with penlights patrolling the aisles to make darn certain this does not get on YouTube but rather preserved for Showtime or HBO or something you go past on the uptown or downtown tour bus.

Michael Moore has more in common with Donald Trump than he does with me. We would never take our Thelma & Louise road trip to save the world. I just don’t see it happening. I love MM fighting for Flint and health care and getting it about the rich and the poor. But he had such a chance with Fahrenheit 9/11 to tell the whole truth and why didn’t he? I think, publically, he would say that what I would call vital truths are but mere conspiracy theories, but he would be wrong. He should know that 9/11 truth, Sandy Hook truth, Boston truth, is all about peace, revolution, fighting poverty, is all about fighting Trump . . . and Obama . . . and Bush . . . and Clinton.

As for Donald Trump and me, I, I would guess we are both narcissists for no reason, not that it matters. I want my statue in Central Park. I want to be Solzhenitsyn in the U.S. I want to be the dissident novelist that does not exist in the United States. I want to fight the empire with my novels and that is crazy. I know that. Nobody profits from my books trapped in the Duluth public library in a cardboard Blatz box under Ms. Bushey’s desk. And “profits” is key. You see that in the center of America, which is way more Times Square than Gopher Prairie.

It does not matter but that it sells. It costs something over one hundred dollars, half-price, tickets bought on day of the show at a certain place, to see Michael Moore on Broadway and about one hundred [one wine, two beers] to eat at the Olive Garden in Times Square.

The truth is that people are good. You see it clearly walking the sidewalks of New York. They have to be just as starved as I am for the root, the real deal, and Jim Fetzer, Jessica Reznicek, Kevin Barrett, Ruby Montoya, Sophia Smallstorm, Frank Cordaro, and James Tracy should be preaching, cavorting, singing, dancing naked in the Belasco Theater every night for the next two years.

Then you would have something.

What you have now is entertainment, truth light, with MM, who is still talking about how great is Hillary Clinton and how she was screwed out of the election by the Russians. MM must not have seen the YouTube of The Yes Men. Someone should send it to him. Then he might know a little of what the Democrats could be. That’s what the Democrats almost were with Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the peace movement, the hippies. They scared the shit out of the front row people in the Belasco and the Eugene O’Neil Theater and they killed them.

Moore talks in his show about how he got a taste of that. He must have backed off because we have never really seen how good Michael Moore could be, in my opinion. He surely does know the truth. But he says nothing and they do not kill him.

And we are left to live in fantasyland, trying to figure it all out, much as the Ugandan natives attempting to understand The Book of Mormon and apply it to their lives, taking selfies with exploding billboards our background, but it’s not really living. Flint and Detroit and Mosul and Fallujah still burn because we don’t really want the truth.

We have elected Trump and Michael Moore and The Atlantic because that is the world we want.

I co-host a podcast, a “radio show,” with Chuck Gregory on Thursday nights, The New American Dream. We’ve been doing that since 2011, because there should be somewhere people can go for the truth. The American-Russian novel all we need is more vodka radio hour.

The New American Dream means never having to say some question or idea is not valid.

We are allowed to ask any questions that we have, there are no wrong questions.

There is no hidden black military budget, there are no UFO files Americans cannot see, no JFK documents that will not be opened during our lifetimes, no destroyed RFK murder photos by the L.A. police, no evidence from Ground Zero taken away before we can even look at it—we are not the U.S.S.R. of the 1960s—this is supposed to be America. That is our dream, to become America, The New America, the real hope of the world.

We have a dream of bringing the United States politicians, journalists and generals who have brought about this long 16-year war and debacle to trial—and put on TV just like O.J.—every afternoon—so every American can watch . . . just like the McCarthy Hearings and the JFK funeral procession.

What we need is a New American Dream.

Not of new homes and toasters and microwaves, but of becoming the type of country we always thought we were.

Right now we live on lies. We subsist on lies, but it’s not really living.

9/11 was an inside job.

They all know that.

What we need in America is a Truth Commission like they had in South Africa to heal their broken country. We need to put certain people on the stand and we need to be allowed to ask questions.

Our country is surely broken as well.

The troops are not protecting us. That is someone’s spin on the day’s news—somebody’s advertising slogan—someone else’s sermon.

The troops serve the empire. They are not heroes. They kill and plunder for the empire. American bases overseas serve nobody but the empire. The heroes in our country are the protesters, the ones who go face to face with the empire, those in the Plowshares Movement, for one example.

You have to know that Donald Trump knows the whole truth about the 9/11 attacks. He is complicit. He has lied. He has continued the wars everywhere based on a lie. And he knows he is lying.

Trump lies right to our faces on national television just as Barack Obama did when he said that Osama bin Laden had been killed . . . and buried at sea. . . . Osama bin Laden was buried at sea . . . and Jessica Lynch was rescued heroically, the U.S.A. does not torture, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, George Bush won the 2000 election, see, there is a plane there in that hole in Shanksville, it went all the way into that hole and no, there is no blood and no bodies and no luggage scattered . . . or plane parts . . . and Osama bin Laden . . . was buried at sea. . . .

Remember the anthrax letters, which said “Are You Afraid?” Those were not written with a rock and chisel like Fred Flintstone from the recesses of some cave in Afghanistan. Those letters came from persons within our own government.

Like a horror movie and the killer is in the same house with us.

These killers are right here, with us and “they” want us to be afraid.

We cannot be afraid.

Michael Moore is not a real dissident. MM has a Broadway Show. He is a millionaire. He once perhaps put his life on the line to change the world.

Perhaps he was taken upside down by his ankles to the ledge of a Manhattan skyscraper and shown how far down is down.

Maybe he was taken away to a room such as Bill Hicks describes where he saw a video of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas from a view nobody has seen before. Any questions, Michael? “Only what my next film will be about.”

Maybe he stepped back from the edge, understandably, but we are the losers.

There are real dissidents among us, but they are shot in the head on the Chesapeake and Ohio canal towpath or sent plunging into the Minnesota taiga or shoved into Black Marias, or never heard from at all.

They have spent years at the kitchen table trying to put together this 3,000-piece puzzle. They die and others take their place. They exist. They publish books, not with contracts or Times Square luncheons but with their own money and they sell them on the street corner like poets who have spent the morning upstairs writing, then come down to pass these smudged sheets around, these little bits of paper, “here’s something.”

The heart beats. The wrist still holding the pen shows a pulse, there is hope.

Anyone with a line to your show at four o’clock in the afternoon that goes around the corner and an exploding billboard . . . these are not the people to run toward for the truth.

Run away.

Ruth is a good person. When we were in Central Park I watched her give a twenty-dollar tip to a guitarist playing “What A Wonderful World.” She whispered, “that’s my favorite song,” as she teared up. And so as we look through the Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue she has hopes of finding something good, and she does. I walk around, dismayed, doubtful. I see George W. Bush’s book, the one with the paintings of the soldiers he sent to die because there were no weapons of mass destruction and because there were no hijackers, no planes, and Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Powell, Silverstein, Giuliani, they all know that, and so there is this book of paintings of these guys, because George W. Bush can’t say anything. I walk out with nothing.

On the last days we take the tour, the bus tour, downtown, uptown, Brooklyn. The tour guides are amazing. They might be the last bastion of free speech in the United States. One Malaysian tour guide calls Joan Rivers the bravest woman in America. I just love it, riding around and seeing it all. I even know now why it’s called The Big Apple and I know what SoHo means . . . and . . . that’s it. If I lived here I would want to know everybody, every bar, every deli, coffee shop, there is just so much here. I might want to, at first, but it wouldn’t happen, things happen.

We ride along the edge of the Lower East Side and neither of us talks about those days when I was down here, too hard, too damn hard.

There’s just everything in NYC, just everything, riches and poverty, good, bad, and when you hear the tales of the historical people who made big things happen, well things can get in your head like why not me? But . . . there’s also the monks in Central Park trying to sell beads . . . nobody is ever gonna know who they were. Wouldn’t you rather be a nobody? Or not. A penthouse would be nice. The tour bus guides tell us how much they cost. Okay . . . wouldn’t you rather be a nobody, just someone who is a good person who just tries to do the right thing . . . maybe somebody with a lost box of books?

The real heroes, aren’t they the ones who plug away?

I still wouldn’t mind a statue though. Maybe a nobody with a statue.

Or maybe the writer of a Broadway Play: The Capture & Trial of George W. Bush, or The Book Of America.

Naaah, gedoutaheeere.

A guy with a cart, who sells bagels and pretzels all day long in the hot sun and goes home to his family in Queens.

And then they make a TV Show about him and his picture is in Times Square and he is me and . . . !

We stop near Ground Zero, where George W. Bush is a God.

We also pass by the fire house on Eighth Avenue, Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9. And the tour guide points out that a truck from there went to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and did not come back. And I think to myself that I think they died because of the lies of George W. Bush, but nobody ever says that. Wouldn’t their families or Michael Moore or Kurt Anderson want to know the truth about that? Why is it good that their lives and deaths continue to be shrouded in this monstrous lie?

And now it’s time to go back, back to northern Minnesota, not really north-north, but north enough. Back to pick up my recorder in the woods and then listen to seventy-two hours of wind and rustling and maybe Bigfoot whispering “how ’bout some poetry?” Back to a job I love, back to put out the next novel and the next and write the script for The New American Dream Radio Show, and time to head in to town again, to the Duluth Public Library.

Time to write something and send it out again, watch it come back again.

Try again.

I’m pretty sure the firefighters of Ladder 9 didn’t give up, even though the whole world was tumbling down around them.

On the plane ride home the eclipse is kind of a non-event. I’m watching The School Of Rock. In the meantime I have to go twice, two bowls of oatmeal this morning, too many, but I find out that the restroom on this plane is comfortable and private. You can really let loose, you don’t hear much in there and nobody hears you, either, just sayin’. When I came out the second time one of the flight attendants, a large, young black man is standing there. The plane is rocking. It was a bumpy flight and raining in Minneapolis when we landed, anyway, the captain was also talking to the passengers and I didn’t know what was really going on. The black guy and I locked eyes and for a moment neither of us knew what was happening. Then he breaks the lock and smiles and says, “man, you and me, we . . .” And I went to my seat.

So what happened there was that for one moment the black guy did not know if I was a terrorist or not and I did not know what was happening on the plane because I had been in the restroom and the captain was talking on the intercom and the plane was rocking.

And that is life.

In America, in one split moment.

And to me, it should not be that way.

(Also I will tell you that when we were getting our bags down and taking forever to get off the plane I saw that one other person was also watching School of Rock and it was a girl probably in elementary school, so, yeah, at least one other person on that plane knows what the real truth is.)

” . . . Well, it’s been another long week in Moon Rock Lake, Minnesota, my hometown, at the end of the empire.

“There is the park with the band shell and the ice cream and the blankets on the big lawn . . . and children listening from the limbs of the giant oak tree named Ol’ Hickory by the cannon and the swimming hole. We hear the grain dryers humming 24/7 and Mrs. Beazley once again chasing the Kramer kids out of her raspberry bushes.”

We don’t really live in America.

We live in the land of George W. Bush.

It is the world he created, this numbskull, ne’er do well president with the forever smirk etched in his face. Bill Clinton paved the way and pointed toward him, putting things in place, and Barack Obama covered his back, nothing gonna touch him, and now Trump Land. But there is no doubt that IT, American History, as written in the middle school history books and carved into the stone in every graveyard and written by finger in all the new concrete in town, has pointed to this, this takeover of the American mind and culture, and it came to fruition with George the idiot.

G.W.B.

G.O.D.

God.

God Bush.

And what we need is a saying.

What do we say all day to each other? Excuse me, thank you, have a good day. You know when you visit New York City you see how good the world is and how good people are. How can we be on the edge of nuclear war? It’s because the terror is made up. It’s not real. It profits someone. Someone makes money.

* * *

We want to know certain things. We want the truth. We really do. Americans have an inquisitive nature that is built into our culture. Who put the bop in the bop she bop she bop, who put the ram in the ramma lamma ding dong?

If we are to pull out of this collective nose dive to escape this total eclipse of the sun by the image of George W. Bush we just need a saying.

Whatever—actually—fyi . . . those won’t do it.

There is an ewok standing on the edge of the Starship America as it hovers over Manhattan and the ewok is holding a frog in both hands, and there is an eclipse coming, and the Yankees lost four in a row in Boston over the weekend, and an old lost couple wearing YouBetcha hats drinking pitchers in a dive bar in Brooklyn. It is the story of The Book Of America.

Hasa diga George Boosh . . .

Just keep saying it, to yourself, to each other. Over and over and you will pull the Starship America out of the nose dive into the ground.

You can do it.

Do it every morning.

. . . And as our plane leaves Minnesota, pulls away from Mrs. Beazley’s raspberries, headed to New York City, the plane is diverted by two tall, erudite, elderly Minnesotan men, merely by good grammar and suggestion, to Washington, D.C., where they have tickets for The White House Camo Ball, and everyone, no, not everyone, is invited, but when they get back they tell us all about it, in grave, stentorian, erudite Minnesota voices:

” . . . In the Parallelogram Office we find Pres’dent Cosmo Nutt at his Big Desk drawing on his big yellow legal pad . . . working on some last-minute dollar signs, boobs and tanks before he must go down to The Camo Ball.

In The Big Hall . . . we find all the guests dancing around a cherry tree decorated with copies of The 9/11 Commission Report and The Warren Commission Report . . . in a conga line . . . and bowing to the cherry tree . . . to the beat of the band . . . The Good Americans . . . to be followed at midnight by the Baby Boomer Rap Group . . . Rage Against The Mujahadeen.

The party guests drink camo wine, all dressed in formal camo, circle the cherry tree, turning to bow at the chorus, to the beat of The Good Americans new hit song . . .”Dance Like An American . . .”

And that’s the news from Moon Rock Lake, Minnesota, where all the police and soldiers are thugs, all the Democrats and journalists are cowards, and all the Homeland Security COINTELPRO lone gunmen are about average.

Mike Palecek is an American writer, a former small-town newspaper reporter in Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota. He is a former federal prisoner for peace. His most recent novel is CRUSHER vs. The Empire, by CWG Press, the first book in the Geronimo’s Revenge trilogy. The second, CRUSHER In Wonderland, will be released in the fall.