She doesn't have enough ammo to bag that moose.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
VACATION OF THE MIND
De-Ranged Ramblings
Sometimes you need a little time away. A change of scene. Folks call it a “vacation.” It’s a time-honored concept that’s been around for at least a couple of millennia. The Romans called it vacatio. For them, it meant taking a much-deserved break from the scuffling, battling, slaughtering, scraping, and raping that the job of empire expanding demanded. More recently, the term has come to describe any length of time away from the soul crushing 2,250+ hour-a-year societal obligation that most people call their “career.” Coincidentally, career is another word adapted from Latin – carrus - though how a word meaning “wagon” got tangled up in the bizarre concept of performing a task in exchange for paper that represents the value of shiny rocks and must be traded in exchange for food and shelter is truly beyond me. Somehow in those intervening eons we never quite figured out a way to make our carrus vacatio and our vacatio carrus. And that, fellow rangers, is the failure of the human experiment.
But that’s a long, twisty road through tough terrain and perhaps it’s best we don’t start down it just now. Society is what it is, and I honestly wish I could say I had a proper vacation in the last few weeks. Instead, I spent a little time in a fusty county jail and a little more time in the torrid swamps of the way-down South, and while these two locales seldom top lists of ideal vacation destinations, they afforded yours truly a much-needed vacation of the mind.
This takes us back to last month. I was burned out and suffering from one of those nasty political hangovers. You hear many people say that politics is a drug, and I tend to agree. But it’s not an illegal smack-type high that gets its addicts off. Most political junkies I know are much more akin to alcoholics…suffering that long, slow kind of addiction that everyone knows you have but no one confronts you about. It slowly eats you from the inside out, leaving you bloated and broke and your family alone to pick up the pieces after the disease finally gets the best of you.
It got the best of me on September the Fourth. Two and a half days of treading water in a wallowing sea of political poison called the Republican National Committee left me a panting, slobbering wreck. Add that frame of mind to the thousands of slicked-back Republican pols in ill-fitting suits and thousands more uniformed police looking for an excuse to crack down and lock up any babbling sore thumb wandering amongst the herd and you’ve got yourself a particularly toxic recipe. One that landed me stone sober in a Ramsey County drunk tank on a charge of disorderly conduct.
I’m not about to waste your time reliving the whole incident. But suffice it to say it involved what I thought to be a harmless joke about John McCain, an Alaskan moose, and the campaign motto “Country First.” Don’t let the ill-fitting suits fool you; some of those GOP delegates can scrap. They treat fisticuffs like campaigns…the fuckers fight dirty.
It’d be difficult to call being corralled overnight with a bunch of boozy, sweat-drenched Midwesterners a blessing in disguise, but it did allow me to miss the Gov. Palin’s speech at the convention. And I’m deeply grateful that I missed her heralding as the Messiah of the GOP the next morning. I was otherwise occupied, staring at the white painted brick wall, listening to one of my cell mates get sick all over himself, and doing some serious soul searching.
When they finally let me out my pen at six o’clock that next evening, I was pretty sure that St. Paul had had enough of me. And I’d certainly had enough of St. Paul. I hit the road before John McCain even accepted the nomination. Spent the next few weeks in the South - Dothan, Alabama and Macon, Georgia to be precise - trying to polish off another of those personal portraits I started a while back.
While I was out of pocket, I missed all the big news. The biggest, perhaps, was when an ever so humble Hank Paulson reached out his grimy paw and begged for money like a Wall Street urchin. He and the rest the riverboat gamblers in the Bush administration have been riding high, making huge bets on credit and conning average Americans of below-average intelligence that they could live well beyond their means. These people made the mistake of trusting the suits, something I’ve sworn never to do. I keep most of my money buried off the Natchez Trail in a location known only by me and my trusted compadre, Blevins. People used to laugh at me when I told them I buried my money. I told ‘em I rather do it myself than have others do it for me.
The one thing I wish I wouldn’t have missed was Sarah Palin’s epic descent. Once the scripted words were removed from her mouth and she had to produce a few of her own, she revealed herself as a wifty walking stereotype whose deep-seated incuriosity and disdain for book learning made her much more akin to a George W. in red lipstick than the pistol packin’ Reagan-in-a-skirt her handlers posited her to be. When McCain went down to the crossroads and made that deal to become President, I don’t think he realized that even Satan couldn’t handle four more years of this hell.
That’s just what it is and just what it’s been. Hell. I travel all over this wide, open range. And the one thing I can’t help but notice is that people everywhere are tired and weary, beat down for eight long years by this sick-headed band of thieves that ran roughshod over their American Dream. Eight long years of corruption and lies. Eight long years of war-waging and money grubbing. Eight long years that we’ll pay for in perpetuity…the rest of my lifetime, the rest of your lifetime, your children and your children’s children’s lifetimes. Over and over for eternity. That is Hell…the lasting legacy of George W. Bush.
With their American Dream trampled dead in the gutter and everything they’ve worked a lifetime to build crumbling around them, all Americans have left is hope. Hope is the one thing the bastards can’t take away or destroy. The hope that things will change for the better. The hope to one day have the luxury of dreaming again.
I think it's fair to say we need a vacation.
As we close in on what will no doubt be a very close and hotly contested election, I find strength in the words of the great young soul singer Sam Cooke:
There've been times that I've thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come
Oh yes it will.
Sometimes you need a little time away. A change of scene. Folks call it a “vacation.” It’s a time-honored concept that’s been around for at least a couple of millennia. The Romans called it vacatio. For them, it meant taking a much-deserved break from the scuffling, battling, slaughtering, scraping, and raping that the job of empire expanding demanded. More recently, the term has come to describe any length of time away from the soul crushing 2,250+ hour-a-year societal obligation that most people call their “career.” Coincidentally, career is another word adapted from Latin – carrus - though how a word meaning “wagon” got tangled up in the bizarre concept of performing a task in exchange for paper that represents the value of shiny rocks and must be traded in exchange for food and shelter is truly beyond me. Somehow in those intervening eons we never quite figured out a way to make our carrus vacatio and our vacatio carrus. And that, fellow rangers, is the failure of the human experiment.
But that’s a long, twisty road through tough terrain and perhaps it’s best we don’t start down it just now. Society is what it is, and I honestly wish I could say I had a proper vacation in the last few weeks. Instead, I spent a little time in a fusty county jail and a little more time in the torrid swamps of the way-down South, and while these two locales seldom top lists of ideal vacation destinations, they afforded yours truly a much-needed vacation of the mind.
This takes us back to last month. I was burned out and suffering from one of those nasty political hangovers. You hear many people say that politics is a drug, and I tend to agree. But it’s not an illegal smack-type high that gets its addicts off. Most political junkies I know are much more akin to alcoholics…suffering that long, slow kind of addiction that everyone knows you have but no one confronts you about. It slowly eats you from the inside out, leaving you bloated and broke and your family alone to pick up the pieces after the disease finally gets the best of you.
It got the best of me on September the Fourth. Two and a half days of treading water in a wallowing sea of political poison called the Republican National Committee left me a panting, slobbering wreck. Add that frame of mind to the thousands of slicked-back Republican pols in ill-fitting suits and thousands more uniformed police looking for an excuse to crack down and lock up any babbling sore thumb wandering amongst the herd and you’ve got yourself a particularly toxic recipe. One that landed me stone sober in a Ramsey County drunk tank on a charge of disorderly conduct.
I’m not about to waste your time reliving the whole incident. But suffice it to say it involved what I thought to be a harmless joke about John McCain, an Alaskan moose, and the campaign motto “Country First.” Don’t let the ill-fitting suits fool you; some of those GOP delegates can scrap. They treat fisticuffs like campaigns…the fuckers fight dirty.
It’d be difficult to call being corralled overnight with a bunch of boozy, sweat-drenched Midwesterners a blessing in disguise, but it did allow me to miss the Gov. Palin’s speech at the convention. And I’m deeply grateful that I missed her heralding as the Messiah of the GOP the next morning. I was otherwise occupied, staring at the white painted brick wall, listening to one of my cell mates get sick all over himself, and doing some serious soul searching.
When they finally let me out my pen at six o’clock that next evening, I was pretty sure that St. Paul had had enough of me. And I’d certainly had enough of St. Paul. I hit the road before John McCain even accepted the nomination. Spent the next few weeks in the South - Dothan, Alabama and Macon, Georgia to be precise - trying to polish off another of those personal portraits I started a while back.
While I was out of pocket, I missed all the big news. The biggest, perhaps, was when an ever so humble Hank Paulson reached out his grimy paw and begged for money like a Wall Street urchin. He and the rest the riverboat gamblers in the Bush administration have been riding high, making huge bets on credit and conning average Americans of below-average intelligence that they could live well beyond their means. These people made the mistake of trusting the suits, something I’ve sworn never to do. I keep most of my money buried off the Natchez Trail in a location known only by me and my trusted compadre, Blevins. People used to laugh at me when I told them I buried my money. I told ‘em I rather do it myself than have others do it for me.
The one thing I wish I wouldn’t have missed was Sarah Palin’s epic descent. Once the scripted words were removed from her mouth and she had to produce a few of her own, she revealed herself as a wifty walking stereotype whose deep-seated incuriosity and disdain for book learning made her much more akin to a George W. in red lipstick than the pistol packin’ Reagan-in-a-skirt her handlers posited her to be. When McCain went down to the crossroads and made that deal to become President, I don’t think he realized that even Satan couldn’t handle four more years of this hell.
That’s just what it is and just what it’s been. Hell. I travel all over this wide, open range. And the one thing I can’t help but notice is that people everywhere are tired and weary, beat down for eight long years by this sick-headed band of thieves that ran roughshod over their American Dream. Eight long years of corruption and lies. Eight long years of war-waging and money grubbing. Eight long years that we’ll pay for in perpetuity…the rest of my lifetime, the rest of your lifetime, your children and your children’s children’s lifetimes. Over and over for eternity. That is Hell…the lasting legacy of George W. Bush.
With their American Dream trampled dead in the gutter and everything they’ve worked a lifetime to build crumbling around them, all Americans have left is hope. Hope is the one thing the bastards can’t take away or destroy. The hope that things will change for the better. The hope to one day have the luxury of dreaming again.
I think it's fair to say we need a vacation.
As we close in on what will no doubt be a very close and hotly contested election, I find strength in the words of the great young soul singer Sam Cooke:
There've been times that I've thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come
Oh yes it will.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)