ANOTHER Catastrophe - TOTALLY Unexpected, of Course (Yawn).

Son of a gun! One of the bridges over the Mississippi in the Twin Cities has fallen into the river. Did anybody who watches the news other than the tabloid, who’s doing whom in show biz have any doubt about what we’d hear next?

I digress momentarily to report that a woman on television is saying that a high percentage of men over fifty years of age “have prostate issues.” Honey, men of all ages have issues from their prostates. It’s called sperm.

Hard behind the lady who knows about prostate “issues” is a FoxNews expert analyst, a lieutenant colonel discussing the ignorance of Barak Obama concerning Pakistan and Afghanistan who says John Kennedy won the Medal of Honor in World War Two.

Oh, and HEY – I’m a war hero! That’s according to Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, and a couple more of our nation’s genius pundits, who say that anybody who wears our military uniform and goes to war is a hero. I’ll be damned. All these years of being treated like a bastard cat, and now I’m a f------- hero. What’s with THAT?!

The bridge, the bridge. Hell, I’m tired of saying “I told you so.” Every now and again between the relentless commercials, however, the several news networks “newscasts” come back to tell us all that “authorities” knew the Interstate 35W bridge was unsafe for at least seventeen years. Anybody remember how many years before the levees in New Orleans failed engineers were saying they would? How about how many years before 9-11 I wrote to tell the nation about what would happen when a big airplane hit a skyscraper . . . ???????

Every now and then between commercials . . . Anybody see a clue there? Possibly some indication why the nation has continued to ignore the obvious concerning one of several thousand decrepit and sagging old bridges? Why the nation has been pretending it doesn’t know about its crumbling infrastructure – thirteen percent of its bridges, just for instance, that are unsafe, and have been known to be unsafe for as many as forty years?

And pundits, officials, and all the great minds say we “don’t know where the money is going to come from? Has anybody heard anyone say that about the war in Iraq? Hmmmmmmm?

Come on, people - you don’t see a parallel where our broken borders with Mexico are concerned? The air traffic control system? National security (the World Trade Center debacle)? National health care? Our schools? Internal Revenue Service and our idiotic tax system? The U.S. Congress (fifty-six thousand lobbyists? The presidency and the broken system that delivered us to into the hands of George W. Bush and the military industrial corporations?

Oh, never mind . . . Any society that builds and drives over bridges that fall down isn’t likely to listen to anything rational, anyway. Res ipse loquitur. To borrow from another of your geniuses, one who thinks that fire can’t melt steel (I wonder what Rosie O’Donnell will have to say about this), “google it.”

But if you want to know what will happen with terrorism, illegal immigration, the health care system, education, taxation, and all that stuff secondary in importance to Britney Spears prat-falling, Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, Lindsay Lohan’s whatever, and all that, need only look to the Interstate 35W bridge. That’ll tell you what to expect, as well as what will be said and done in the aftermath. You’ve seen it again and again.

When the catastrophic effects of carbon dioxide pollution become noticeably catastrophic, you’ll know everything you need to know. Hell, you may be able to profit by writing the script for the “experts” and “analysts” like those I mentioned at the top here.

Maybe not – they only have to fill in the blanks in the “boilerplate” script they read from after each succeeding disaster.

One thing sure – it won’t interrupt the commercials. If that doesn’t tell you something, nothing will.