Interviews

Sabotage in Austin

Text by Margaret Moser
Sunday March 21, 2004 5:15pm
San Jose Motel
Austin, Texas

Part 3

JC: The show was so damn long. (Is shifting around in the chair getting more comfortable)

MM: I thought it was one of the best in a long time. They didn't take themselves so seriously, a good indication. So I have some questions for you from your fans from the list here.

JC: OK

MM: This guy Ed is really funny. He says, "Besides Denver, what's your favorite city to do things in, and what are those things?"

JC: Awwww, Ed! Is that Ed Ward? (chuckles)

MM: No, this guy's a screenwriter. (Sorry, Ed! I was looking at Colin's name at that moment!)

JC: Is he?

MM: Yeah. Lotta great people on here.

JC: So he knows about that ... I didn't know that Warren Zevon had written that song.

MM: You didn't?

JC: I was in the middle of an interview in Belgium, and this guy said, "here, have you seen this?" He showed me this Warren Zevon album and there was this song in there. And I read the lyrics of the song, and I thought, "Okay, I can see where somebody could get the movie from this, because it's such a boiler plate, so street. Check out the movie, these characters (mumbles). And I really didn't know he'd written the song and I was kind of ... (shrugs with a little boyish hunch of the shoulders and looks up wide-eyed) But ... apart from Denver, what other cities? Amsterdam, Berlin ... I like a whole bunch of them. I like Paris ...

MM: And Austin. You say nice things about Austin.

JC: I like Austin. (We were grinning at each other and I know he was thinking about the wild days.) MM: Who's worse: Bush or Blair?

JC: Bush. There's not much in it. I mean, Bush deliberately went and lied. But the thing is, you gotta understand what they did. They shifted the role of the president. The way the office was set up, they have a whole bunch of people that are unelected running the government. Bush, the figurehead, is a dauphin. He's like ... really, he's a non-entity. And the office of the president is just like a figurehead. It's not a functioning office anymore. It's [Karl] Rove, [Paul] Wolfowitz, and [Dick] Cheney - especially Cheney - that are running the whole thing.
With Blair, he just loaded everything up on weapons of mass destruction. When I read that dossier ... I downloaded that dossier from the Middle Eastern Quarterly, it was like something that was available on the web. I didn't spoil it at the time but then when they said, hey, you believe this? And sure enough ... So, what Blair did was a foolish little boy. What Bush did was a little bit more malignant. Still there's ... I think it's really ...

MM: He's a fucking idiot, John.

JC: There was a moral strength to the United States and it's gone. I don't know where it's gone but you better get it back really fast.

MM: Do you think part of the problem was we made such a big deal out of blowjob in the previous presidency. Then along comes Bush and 9-11 and JC: No, I don't think anybody wanted to (mumbles) the presidency. Just because he invented the web isn't good enough.

MM: But this was Bush's town here [when he was governor]. The stories ... and it's not a moral thing, it's like how did this fucking idiot get in? Was it really grooming and the right daddy?

JC: Not very much grooming went into it. But I did hear from a fellow who went to a press conference at the White House who says it's scary. The guy is very together. The first assessment put together two professors of political science. One was at Columbia and they were advisers, they called in to advise him. And he was on Charlie Rose saying, there's good news and there's bad news. And the bad news is, the gulf of ignorance is enormous. The good news is, the linen coat is really sharp. And it really doesn't matter because he's irrelevant. He's not the one making the decisions and the office of the president has been vacant for the past three years or so.

MM: Is he going to get re-elected?

JC: If we're not careful.

MM: Do you think Kerry can?

JC: I like what Chomsky said, that Kerry is "Bush lite," ‘cause ??? data have that Kerry and Bush are both candidates for the business party. ??? and Nadar but there's no constituency for Nadar and ???. There's no one out there except Ted Kennedy that's fighting for health care revision, prescription drugs ... it's like an enormous boondoggle for the pharmaceutical industry.
And when you look at television ... I was asking someone in London, have you noticed how many ads there are for drugs. I don't even know what these drugs are anymore. Some of them are for women and some for men and I can't tell the difference. He said, what percent do you think are of all the ads on television? And he said 65%. I mean that's phenomenal.
What's wrong with this picture? Down in Colombia, they're trying to cut the cocaine crop, won't put marijuana as a legal drug, because the pharmaceutical ??? has a grip on ??? in Washington. Old story.

MM: Back in 1980, you signed the Sabotage single for me, "Mercenaries," as "John Cale in '80."

JC: Hoooooooo! (grins really big)

MM: Pretty priceless, actually (laughs)

JC: Yeah - chutzpah!

MM: What about Kerry, though? And what about Nadar?

JC: Well, you've got ... I dunno, it's a race to the finish because if you let Bush in there anymore, you'll just dismantle whole chunks of legislation that really empower a strata of society that are really getting lost and falling into the cracks. But Nadar is running on the assumption that these things are there already rather than developing them, do you know what I mean? Like, they're not fully grown. And that's what's going to happen. I hope Kerry gets in. I think he's got his work cut out for him because they've made such a mess. Who's going to clean up ...
I mean, this book by [Kenneth] Timmerman about how France betrayed America [The French Betrayal of America] is ridiculous. This vitriolic screed comes out and ... anyway that's ... (shakes his head) fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

MM: During all that stuff if you went driving down in Cajun Louisiana, you saw signs for "Freedom Fries" being sold by people with French surnames. It was kind of staggering.

JC: Who drives down there? Most people fly in.

MM: They use airboats through the swamps. (we stop to refill water glasses) MM: On 9-11, you were as close as anyone could be to Ground Zero and survive. What happened first? You heard something.

JC: Yep.

MM: You heard what, sound? And you stayed there until you were evacuated?

JC: I was ... well, you talked to Sturgis.

MM: Yes, that day, and I saw the photos and stuff. What was going on in your mind? You're so astute about all this ...

JC: I didn't believe it at first but Sturgis was the one who said, "Get the fuck out of there, man, we're being attacked!" And I was like, "turgis, c'mon ...". And I'd already been out for the paper and I heard screaming but I didn't know what it was. And I just sort of ... I didn't know where it was coming from because I was walking back. And I kind of looked up in the air and there was a beautiful layer of silver paper, so shining ... the wind is blowing and it's like a shimmering light of paper. And I thought, where is this coming from?
I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a fire or something. Then I got indoors and it went on from there but it was a question of whether I was to go out or not go out. I decided to stay where I was because I didn't think they were going to come down ... there's a hill that crests at Broadway and the other side of that hill is where the WTC was. And so anything that happened over there, I didn't think would come to Gold Street, Fulton and Gold. But watching the television ... watching the networks, that was going wild. Watching New York 1 was very calm. So I just watched New York 1 for a while. Then I heard about the Pentagon and all of a sudden it started to come together for me ... the air corridors were shut down ...
I mean, I heard the noise come. I have a lot of windows in the loft. It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining. And all of a sudden it went dark in the loft. I went to the window and it was like Christmas or something - white. And people are staggering through it, because there's a hospital down the road from me. And all the people .. Secret Service people, marshals, with masks on, covered in dust, groups of policemen walking purposefully among ... and then a pair of guys pushing a gurney back up the street. It was really weird.

MM: And you took pictures.

JC: Yeah. And I didn't have to leave until 4 o'clock, when everything went out. And I moved up to the Village but that noise of that building coming down ... I was asleep about 3 in the morning and they'd sent the national guard, they sent, you know, 16 fighters up to Newark to patrol and they were taking off at 3 o'clock in the morning. And I sat bolt upright in bed. It was exactly the same as that building coming down.
But trying to get back down there, it was the world of ID. You'd get down to Canal Street and don't go any further. But then if you walked to East Village and, you could walk down Water Street but when you were down there, it was just all these firetrucks and cars that were just sitting. There was one car that was covered in this white powder and no windows and a bright red rose sticking out of it. No wheels, everything had burnt up, but it had been dragged there and left. There was a line with all the CNN people and everybody was there ... instead of ??? to the press. Going back and forth was interesting. I went back every day though the National Guard had been dispersed but I saw ... And then I got a visit from FEMA, which was really interesting. This guy had come from - I think he used to work at Hewlett Packard - he retired from Hewlett-Packard then the Woodridge earthquake happened.

NS: Northridge.

JC: Northridge. And he had a friend call him up and say, we need some systems engineers to go up. So he said since then he'd stayed in New York doing ??? He'd spent a lot of years in Istanbul and he said we did everything in Istanbul. He said we used to know when the Russians went to the bathroom, everything. And he was there with one of these network tablets, you know, that you write on and it looks just like a ??? book. So all I wanted to do was look at this tablet. "We wanna know all this stuff..." and I'm like all right, all right. (laughs) He was great.

MM: Were you surprised by the method of the attack?

JC: I just thought, "You assholes - you should have known this was going to happen! They already tried once and it was only like 8 months before! MM: Well, 1993.

JC: But they were so lucky when that happened! And they've caught umpteen numbers of attempts! But, you know, it's that cootchy-coo style of U.S. foreign policy - "c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" And they had it all worked out. They just needed one thing like that to really justify in their own minds they could push everybody's button and go and do ... and I can't help thinking that when you have somebody in Tel Aviv telling you, "Look, you're the only superpower in the world. Act like one." Don't just sit there do nothing. Do something and get active. But it touches a nerve.