Down the Rabbit Hole

Can't seem to find out how many in Iraq yesterday. Not important enough for the people who wanted to know about somebody named Angelina Jolie's baby by some dork named Pitt. You know - what's the latest on Natalee Holloway? Odds on the Stupor - oops, Super - Bowl? By the way - has anybody EVER seen a man buy one of those tabloid magazines? A guy I know has worked at the check-out counter for nine years, never once in all that time sold a tabloid news magazine to a male. When you realize that people who believe Christ is back on earth disguised as an alligator vote - and guess who they voted for - you see some of the problem as I see it.

And, ye gods! – The rest of the news of this country sounds like something out of bedlam. Where to start . . . Well, first, we have his majesty, George the First, running around the country saying things like, “If somebody is exchanging e-mails with al Qa’ida, we want to know why.” Then he says the people who leaked the fact that he is violating the Fourth Amendment and his oath of office should be tried for revealing state secrets. The Greek chorus at Fox News and elsewhere on that side of the lunatic fringe sing back-up. Hmmm.

Let’s see if I have this straight. If you order people tortured, George, and someone “leaks,” they should be tried for revealing state secrets? How about if you rob a bank, or murder or rape somebody?

But there you have it, a microcosm that tells you just about everything you need to know about how far you can trust our Bush League Administration – and federal government in general. How far behind the e-mail and telephone bugs is torture?

Elsewhere, more results from the liberated female segment of the observer's arc. The girls have demanded liberation, and got it. So now we see more of what they wanted. The “recent” – we’re supposed to believe it’s only just lately started happening – spate of gals who want to make it with boys has everybody agape with what seems to me to be bewildered nonplussedness. Here’s a guy – happens to be fourteen – with a chance to screw a beauty queen who happens to be, say, thirty. For all the obvious – well, they would be, were it not for the weird pronouncements of militant feminism – reasons, both parties are happy as a hog in fresh mud.

But for all the factions where the battle of the sexes is concerned, there are a wh-o-o-o-le BUNCH of problems. The cuckoo bird weird (anybody remember Marilyn French's "All men are rapists, and that is all they are"?) want the women tried for rape. They have “abused” the guys. On the other hand, men all across the country – and, presumably, planet – are saying, “God – let me be abused like that! Please!”
And yeah, I know – “It’s the law.” It’s also another microcosm by which to judge the cogitative brilliance of the booby-hatch otherwise known as U.S. society, the reason I’ve always since boyhood tried resolutely to stay away.

Moving on through those chronicles of erudition, wisdom, and light, the news, we find an article concerning the convenience – for holdup and smash and grab men, anyway (did Congress invent these things, maybe) – story clerk who drove a frequent – four or five time, apparently – robber off with a baseball bat. Thankfully, the commentator reported that “The clerk won’t be charged.”

Another microcosm. First you fight for your life, then wonder it you'll be charged with anything. Or what.

Then there’s the latest from New Orleans, stuff like people who have repairs on their homes largely finished, only to learn now that the great minds of government intend to bull-doze the neighborhood. Another micro . . . oh, never mind!

What I want to know is where always are the people who bitch so loud and long AFTER something happens BEFORE it happens? There are thousands – literally – of examples, but take New Orleans for one. People to whom the fact that they were living below sea level – and what that means - was as obvious as the Rocky Mountains said absolutely nothing about the condition of the dikes, asked no questions about how dependable they were and all the obvious rest are bitching NOW? In a country whose government’s efficiency and character is as obvious as the MOON? NOW you’re expecting the class of clowns who has been promoted from grade to grade on every possible basis other than academic performance to write a doctoral thesis on something like quantum physics or higher mathematics? JESUS!

Tell me THAT’s not a microcosm of the Land of the Fee.

So here we are down the rabbit hole. Each night, we listen to the Mutt and Jeff, Good Cop, Bad Cop logomachy (look it up, O’Reilly – you supercilious, sesquipedalian nitwit), television and the print media foists on the stupefied public as political debate. Tell me, if it’s true as we’re told again, again, and again, ad nauseum, that the media is all liberal, and that the media is all that persuasive and therefore dangerous to our freedoms, why do we keep drifting – “drifting,” did I say? – we’re “drifting” like an avalanche drifts - toward totalitarianism?

For the love of Mike, the President of the country hands out cockamamie nostrums and excuses like this latest (I’m still agape at the way he hornswoggled the public on those Iraqi WMDs) eavesdropping canard and it looks like he’ll get away with it! The borders of the nation, the ports and ocean approaches are all wide open – the doors and windows of the house stand ajar – AND THE WAY TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE INSIDE IS TO LISTEN TO THEIR PHONE CALLS?! That’s, in every sense of the word possible, unbelievable! Utter nonsense.

Finally, nothing in the news is more maddening and infuriating as the blatantly cynical contempt this government and its sycophant supporters - hey, it sells yellow ribbons - show for men and women dying for them in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote about the yesterday and the day before; it’s making my blood boil. Things like standing a young private first class in Iraq before a four star general who then asks, “How’s your morale?” Or the FoxNews reporter – sellout pimps like Oliver North – shoving a microphone in the face of a lieutenant or captain in Baghdad and asking how things are going. On TV!

What do you think the guy will say? Try to imagine what would happen to him, were he to tell it like it is. In the novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller wrote, "All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives. There was no end in sight."

Try to imagine that young lieutenant or captain saying, “Well, there’s no end in sight.”

I’m reminded again – hell, I’m reminded every day – of second President John Adams’ dictum. “The proposition that the people are the best protectors of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will as a political body.”

When historians of the future write about this time, there is no doubt whatever that they will recall Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They’ll read some of the crap we hear every night on the news, and say with the poet, "Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."

As for me, I’m wondering how much longer to stay here in Wonderland. “Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.” “How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice. “You must be,’ said the Cat, “or you wouldn't be here.”

Yeah.