anaman51's journal

Part the First: Dogville, where I live. Time has brought about that which I had foreseen, the po-po having been called to quell the racket from next door. This took place two nights ago, and the manager was told yesterday. She asked what happened, and I told her the officer ordered him to turn down his Surround Sound---and to leave it down.

Television commercials have become something to look forward to, since the overall quality of content on TV, whether cable or broadcast, is getting more miserable by the day. It used to be, at least to my way of thinking, that there was a difference between the level of intelligence expressed in high-end television commercials during major productions and certain hours of the evening, and the plastic crap commercials that generally come with the late-night swill I watch. You used to be able to determine easily what time of day it was by the overall tenor of the commercials running at that time. Ditzy housewives who couldn’t make things clean was a big give-away during the daytimes, with automobiles, aluminum siding and beer taking up the evening hours.

I sought out a documentary to watch this afternoon, one that began with promising new narration although the photo material was the same I had seen many times before. The subject was gangsters, the original Sicilian Mafia in America, their opponents, their lucrative and often bloody illegal business ventures, and their propensity for making money on those desires and habits our society has deemed so nasty or reprehensible to the notions of decent folk that they have been forbidden to us under the threat of legal persecution. These include the usual gamut of suspects such as gambling, prosititution, shylocking, arm breaking, and the odd murder. Also on the list are those perennial favorites, dope and liquor. History teaches us that the Noble Experiment, the Volstead Act, proved to be one of the most dismal (and hated) follies our government has perpetrated on the people. But, as is our nature even when we insist we know better, we are inclined to forget the lessons history has preserved for us.

It's the same old swill in the national news. The lies are coming thick and fast from the White House, all calculated to support Bush’s idiot wars. Another 3200 grunts are off to Afghanistan, and hardly anyone notices; all eyes are on Iraq and Iran, with everyone wondering what phony gimmick will be cooked up to immerse us up to our eyeballs in another bloody stupid mess. The most recent, the “Iranian mortar round,” turned out to be grade "AA" bullshit from a probable U.S. source. It was a desperate effort to make Iran appear to be as dirty as possible in the eyes of the public before Bush’s cronies pull whatever stunt they’ve got waiting in the wings. I wonder who or what Osama bin Hidin’ will blow up this time? From the grave, no less. What a painfully obvious bucket of brainless shit our leader is.

I swear, George W. Bush should be plugged into a device that refuses to let him function when he does something as patently stupid as ordering another 20,000 troops into a military quagmire of his own making.

The middle of this week, George W. Bush will parrot the approximate words of his speechwriters, who are desperately working around the clock trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. He will explain to us why we need to send more troops to support his illegal war, troops we don't even have.

I have just finished writing the necessary emails, once again urging my Senators and Representatives to Just Say No. No more funding for Bush's illegal war, no more troops sent into a pointless fight, and no more notices sent to dead people to come back and fight some more.

It would appear that god has chosen his new messenger, a new hairy ear into which to mutter news of coming events. Pat Robertson has announced that he has heard god's muttering, and is passing on the word that terrorist attacks and mass killings are forthcoming in 2007.

I guess it's safe to say I became disenchanted with the path the world was taking, and decided to shove my poor ol' aching head down deep in the sand for a while. I needed some separation from the news media, both popular and otherwise, before my head exploded. The results were predictable.

Another article in this column is due today, and I’ve got bupkis. Life hasn’t been that inspiring lately, I guess. It’s not like there aren’t enough volatile topics hovering around the mess in Washington D.C., it’s just that I’ve been patently ignoring that whole scene for a little while. It was time to give my battered brain a break. Oh, I glance at the headlines and shake my head with disgust at the general direction of things, but I know I have no effect on the outcome of anything going on outside of my own tiny sphere of existence, and damned little of what takes place inside. My influences are quite limited, which is probably all to the greater good. The last thing this world needs is more disenchanted middle-aged pseudo-philosophers muttering into their beards. There’s enough public equivocating and rationalizing taking place to fill ten thousand columns, but writing about issues and changing the outcome are two completely different things. Again, I speculate about what happened to good old common sense, and not for the last time, I would imagine.

A visit to the web did little to improve my opinion of the situation. America has stumbled and fallen into a bottomless sinkhole, and may not make it back to the surface. The country continues to deteriorate, and I feel utterly helpless in the face of it. Nothing I can write, nothing I can say, will force those fools who still support that ugly little wart in the White House to reconcile with their complicity in his crimes. His philosophy remains the same no matter how badly it fails; he’s staying the course---even if it leads us into the tiger’s mouth. George W. Bush has shown himself time after time to be stupid, uncaring, incompetent, wasteful of our tax money, and unimaginably cruel to those of our citizens who are least able to defend themselves. He has no understanding whatsoever of what it means to be a normal, ordinary citizen, one who holds an ordinary job and lives in a normal neighborhood in a normal city. He has no understanding of how it feels to shoulder crushing debts all his working life, because every time he’s fallen into debt, the family fortune was there to save him. All his life he’s been rescued from one disaster of his own making after another, ran business concerns into the ground, and made excuses for his failures that laid the blame on others. His faith in his god leads him to believe he hears a holy voice inside his mushy head, and it directs him to do the things we all love him for, like lying to the nation in order to justify invading Iraq, and then supporting out-of-control troops as they slaughter countless numbers of innocent Iraqi citizens in their search for insurgents.

And yet we look on, feeling powerless to defend ourselves against this juggernaut of fascism. As we watch in stunned silence, our freedoms are being deleted “for our own protection.” While we watched and did nothing, the Republican Machine took away from our most helpless citizens their very lives, cutting off the funding for those much-needed social programs that keep millions from suffering from lives spent in excruciating poverty. A government ruled by those who will always have enough to eat perpetrated this outrage---they simply don’t care if millions of others suffer, as long as isn’t them.

We watched as our remaining forests were sold off to the big lumber companies, and we look on as millions of Americans go to work every day without health insurance to protect them and their families. We stood by as the national treasury was looted, while Bush’s rich friends took advantage of the situation by accepting huge tax breaks so they can keep even more of their obscene fortunes. As this is going on, thousands upon thousands of our war veterans have been stripped of the services they were promised for serving our country. Thousands of those veterans, still suffering from the ramifications of their wars, now live on the streets of our nation and must beg for their very survival. Tell me, America; was this what you envisioned when you voted for that jerk? Were you ready for the endless stream of lies and double deals, the bags of money changing hands under the table, the crushing blows to our elderly and disabled? Were you ready for unending war? The time to vote is approaching again, America. You have another chance.