Skip to main content

Build a Fence

Tea Party!  Sister Sarah!  Ayn Rand!  Raggedy And!  Rand Paul! 

It is all so confusing!  Nothing makes sense! 

The Republicans took a huge budget surplus and turned it into a monstrous deficit.  They did that, partly by cutting taxes on people who made a lot of money, and partly by refusing to include the cost of a war we did not need in the budget.  They hated big government and made it bigger.  They hated government regulation of private enterprise more than they hated Bill Clinton, so Wall Street invented ways to divide NYSE initials by 37.5, divide it by a formula for cough medicine, submit the remainder to an acrostic program, and sell whatever came out to people as a way to get rich without every knowing what it was they just bought.  When the roof caved in, they gave three trainloads of money to whoever could argue they were too big to fail. 

Then, when the roof caved in, we elected Democrats, who said, "What happened?" and "Oh, my good god, the roof is caving in!"  Then the Bank repossessed the house, and Chrysler went broke because it deserved to, and everybody said, "Look!  We are up shit creek, and the President is a Black Democrat, and the government is giving all the money to the rich guys, and Sarah Palin gave up being Gobernator of Alaska half-way through her first term, and Rand Paul said government had every right to ban discrimination in government-owned enterprises, but that people who owned their own businesses had every right to be as fascist as they chose, but that he, of course, would never do anything like that, although they had every right to do that because we are a free country, and if we want to say ugly things and do uglier things, if we own the things, then maybe the South will rise again!

British Petroleum blew a cheap plug in an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, and as it seems that our whole east coast is going to get lubricated, people got all pissed off, again, and said that government, whom they have always hated, and tried to starve to death because government is bad, and incompetent, and ought to be drowned in a bathtub, was to blame for not being able to stop the oil leak which British Petroleum said they had not really thought would happen, but that they were willing to pay up to half a day's wages to almost anybody, and that the rest was really the responsibility of government. 

So if, as someone said, your name begins with "Senator" or "Congressman", everybody hates you for all of that, and more and better besides. 

If we did not know, with all the the serenity of a Christian holding four aces, that this is the Greatest Nation in the world, God's New Eden, and that we are God's Special People, and that the problem is taxes, and government, and people with brown and black skin, and that there is no way a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Secular Idiot can really be as American as a tea-bag-dangling Baptist from south of the Mason-Dixon line, we would be in big trouble right now.  But we do know God loves those of us who are Christian, and Libertarian, and are smart enough to stock Spam and ammunition because the Communists and other Bible-hating free thinkers and homo-types are going to take over this country and begin selling French Fries, again. 

This is no time to let down our guard, or to waste time thinking!  This is a time to act!  Get away from the middle, where all the liberal left-wingers are!  Maybe we should all move to Costa Rica with Rush Limbaugh.  Maybe just to Arizona.  Build a fence.  Rent-a-Boy.  Get back to our principles. 

Oh, dear god!  It is enough to almost make one wish. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...