Wheel! Of! FISH!

Put it in the "D" File, Brisbane.

2002-04-03 - 5:31 p.m.

Behold the slightly new and improved version of this page!

Is it not radiant? Does it not fill you with the sublime joy normally only experienced when touring a room of full of Botticelli canvases while stuffed to the gills on some primo neuroreactives?

To give credits where credits are due, the picture which looms large above my wordage was done by the hand of Clifford Charles Richards III, Suicide Sam E. to you, my best of friends and oldest compatriot in the battles against mundanity and the commonplace which take up practically our entire existence. When we're not busy watching "The Simpsons".

The picture is obviously of a masked squid, probably of the giant variety, carving the letter "R" into the wall with a rapier. Why IS he carving an "R"?

Because he's using a rapier?

Because he's fond of Rabelais?

Because he thinks it's retro?

Who can say? Who knows what mysteries lurk in the hearts of masked giant squids? The Wheel knows, but like hell he's going to tell you, pig! You'll have to tear his heart out and stomp it flat, and then he'll just spit blood in yer face, copper! He's no mere man! He's a rambunctious rogue, raring to roar rude riles!

Ah, the eternal verities of art.

A moment of contemplation, then, of the sketches such as this one that make life worth the living.

...

You know, after World War II, William Randolph Hearst finally experienced what it was like to be in decline. Some would argue that he had been in decline since the late 1920s, which is true in its own way, but he really became aware of his own end, I think, after the Second World War.

He had, for the second time in his life, unsucessfully backed Germany in print in an effort to keep America out of a European war ... of course, this time Germany really DID turn out to be peopled with monsters and ravening maniacs, so he dropped that hot potato pretty quickly.

Not quick enough to please the gov'ment, however, which placed him once more under investigation to see is he was the tool of the Hun. If he was, he hid it well. The scars stayed with him, though, and his loyal readership dropped away slowly as the man who was referred to as the "greatest living American" by Teddy Roosevelt found himself labelled a traitor.

Hearst was not only a Benedict Arnold to his country, but he was a cad cavorting around with a starlet while his wife languished. Of course, his wife despised him and refused to give him a divorce so she could keep his name and money, and the "starlet" was not at all young but had stuck by Hearst since 1915. This was not enough to save his image, though.

"Citizen Kane" had come out ten years prior and had made Hearst the greatest laughingstock in the country. The entire film was a cruel joke barbed just for Hearst, and despite his best efforts and the full force of his media empire, he could not stop its release. "That little Commie fop" Orson Welles (a term Hearst also used for Charlie Chaplin, whom he had once tried to shoot aboard his yacht. "The Oneida") got his film, and Hearst got shrifted off into the annals of hilarious has-beens.

You should see "RKO-281" and the excellent documentary "The Battle over Citizen Kane", which comes in the special edition "Citizen Kane" DVD, which EVERYONE should see, frequently. It might be cruel, but cruelty makes the best art.

Hearst's best friend and the guiding light of his editorial staff for forty years, Arthur Brisbane, finally died an honored death, and Hearst took over his position, writing daily signed columns appearing in all his papers and often read over the radio. The column was "In the News", and Hearst took the opportunity to look at world events and write rambling claptraps about the things he had seen and what he expected and who he blamed for all that was wrong with the world. It was touching to see. I especially liked the column where he wrote about being a pioneer child.

He had been raised on San Francisco's Nob Hill by his mother and a series of servants while his father was out tending to a multi-million dollar series of mines, including the Anaconda, which produced more silver than any number of American silver mines put together. Some children get the silver spoon in their mouths. Hearst got a metric ton of blue silver ore.

I was thinking, this morning, that it might be fun to do my own bit of "In the News'", sort of as a tribute to the Chief, to whom I owe my thesis, and sort of as a bit of journalistic exercise, which is so hard to come by these days.

Then I read today's headlines.

"Israel Widens West Bank Onslaught": They're still pushing tanks into Bethlehem, following some sort of bloody star, and Egypt has pulled out its ambassadors and prepped its jets. Europe blames the U.S. for greenlighting this, and the U.S. is trying to get Israel to pull its artillery back long enough to send in Colin Powell waving peace pacts over his head like a shield, while Hezbollah crawls out of the woodwork and fires rockets.

"U.S. Denies any Intent to Torture Al-Qaeda Leader": They've bagged themselves a man labelled as a senior tactician for that much-feared and always-growing threat to our national sanctity, the League of Scruffy Foreigners. Donald Rumsfeld said that he had been accused of planning to "I don't even want to use that word! [torture]" the aging Afghani man. He did state, however, for posterity:

"We intend to get every single thing out of him to try to prevent terrorist acts in the future. He will properly interrogated by proper people who know how to do these things. WE will be responsible for that interrogation. Not we, the Department of Defense, but we, the United States of America."

Thanks, Donald. Now I'm not only responsible for the torture of a man whom I know is a terrorist because you tell me he is, but I have to hide under my bed to make sure the "Proper People" don't come for me.

"FBI Investigates Employees Who Fail Polygraph Test": So they've found a Russian spy, evidently left over from 1985 and still looking for that nefarious James Bond, in the FBI, reading classified documents daily. I don't know whether I should be more offended at the intrusion on personal liberties by the FBI (pretty shaky ground there, for once; these people signed agreements saying they'd let the FBI rape them with frozen trout in the interests of national security), or by the fact that it is just now occurring to the director of the FBI that maybe we should check to see if anyone is walking out with documents. Or laptops full of classified information. Or 6 billion dollars. Or over 100 cases of seized weapons. The darndest things get lost in the District of Columbia.

It was then that I realized that the news is too damn depressing to want to write upbeat columns about.

I remembered why I cancelled my newspaper subscription and why I only glance at the electronic headlines daily. I want to hide my head in the sand because it blocks out the terror. Ostriches might be portrayed as cowards, but they've got an eternal wisdom.

Hearst once wrote a column on isolationism, which he was accused of forwarding after World War I -- he had been, to be fair, but he didn't like to characterize it that way.

He wrote: "I believe in peace and in all sane measures to promote peace at home and abroad and among nations -- but particularly at home."

Sometimes ... I just want to go home.

- Wheel

"I have not yet begun to defile myself."