Mourning In America

i had the radio on this easter morning while i was fixing breakfast for the kids; i told them the easter rabbi was coming, and i was cooking up some bacon for him, when i actually heard what was on the radio .... did you hear me shrieking? did you have to duck when i flung it out the window? (N)ationally(P)retentious(R)egurgitation had two pieces juxtaposed that had me slack-jawed with disbelief, until i realized that ... ha ha .... i was in america, where good taste and common sense are scattered as sparsely as teeth in a platypus ..... anyway, one was a ha ha delightfully ducksy-wucksy fuzzy-bunny cutesy piece about how much fun the army can be, featuring .... elvis presley!

the other was about saddened parents, shocked that their high school son enlisted in the army ... and got killed ....

thank god for high school kids .... they don't teach much about death in high school .... they don't have courses on how to stuff your intestines back in your body cavity only your hands got blown off and anyway your head's fifty feet down the road, in a pool of burning gasoline .... great stuff to hear on easter morning, and the only thing i could think of was ....

the king is risen! long live the king!

but ....

jesus has left the building .....

i see that five years after our unilateral illegal amoral invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to us whatsoever except that it had nationalized oil and wouldn't just hand it over to exxon, bp, chevron, and royal dutch shell, we've now officially topped 4,000 dead soldiers (but who gives a shit about the six hundred thousand ir*qis killed in the last five years not to even think about mentioning the ones who died during the sanction years for lack of medicines yada yada yada yada shut up you l*beral bleeding heart whiner fuck you) who won't be rising again but, if i'm to believe cheney--and you know i do, you know i do--it's all worth it and the 70% of the american peeple who are no longer wildly enthusiastic about whatever it is that's going on over there only i'm not quite sure what it might be because we don't get to see any of our guys getting hurt any more not like veet nam where lots of people got hurt and we saw it happening, right while we were hunkered over our tv dinners exept i didn't have a tv not even back then those people are just a focus group and who pays attention to focus groups at least that's what cheney says and there's a man who has to be taken seriously ....

speaking of taking people seriously .....

i think i might have to take obama seriously ..... you know i don't do television but .... i watched and listened to obama's speech, the one in which he sought to address america's concerns that he might have some connection to a religious figure espousing radical and inflammatory views which you know we don't tolerate in this country, certainly not from our religious figureheads, because we're so tolerant of religious freedoms and i'm wondering if the storms in the midwest are a result of god's being angry with john mccain for getting confused about shia and sunni especially now that all hell's breaking loose once again over there and rockets are landing in the green zone and it looks like the cease fire with the mahdi army might be over although i know the splurge is working because security is so much better since most of the people who could cause trouble have been killed and there's nothing as peaceful as a dead man they never give nobody no trouble ha ha but i'm thinking whatever happens in the midwest with those forty displaced wh*te p*ople'll be rectified much more swiftly than the rectumification that didn't happen for the thousands of bl*ck folk down in n'orleans and ....

oh .... sorry .... i was digressing .....

obama's speech was really impressive, and i'm not making this up .... it was impressive because it had content: it was thoughtful, sequential, and deliberate; it was measured, adult, and literate; it didn't insult my intelligence, which is saying a lot because i take offense just watching politicians open their mouths; it didn't pimp, patronize, or pander; it was serious and it had a serious message. and i'm thinking ... that boy's fucked .... because that all constitutes strikes against him because it'll slide right by the american sheeple, conditioned as they are into frenetic pavlovian slobber and stultified oblivion by fox news and madison avenue and the national enquirer and the white house press corpse ..... and it was impressive because it forcibly reminded me that obama is from a different generation, and that--stuck as i am in my own generational amber--i overlook the changes that have happened because i focus on the changes that still need to be made ....

but it was impressive as a performance piece as well, and by that i mean .... the man spoke for thirty-six minutes without obviously referring to notes .... teleprompter? perhaps, but ..... his eyes never flickered to a prompter, not that i could see, while his tone, inflection, and timbre were consistent with his message and .....

i couldn't believe that this man was running for a major political office, not in this country .....

you know, in my psych days i'd look for mood being congruent with affect, which means .... if someone is talking about death, murder, and mayhem, but they're laughing and carefree, mood and affect aren't congruent, so you start to look for pathology .... just like .... ha ha .... our current president, who finds endless shits and giggles in genocide, mass murder, and global economic catastrophes but ..... not with obama .... my musician's ear--the one that still kind of works--and my psych background were pretty impressed .....

there's a downside to this, of course ..... we are continually betrayed by our "media ...." you know, i really don't give much of a scabrous rat's ass about whether or not our politicians are having affairs or chipping on their wives or fucking their dogs .... no, call me callow, but ... i really don't ..... and ever columnar inch of space given to a politician's putative infidelities is attention diverted from catastrophes in tibet or in baghdad or on wall street or on main street ..... ms. clinton seems to be conflating her bona fides, her experience with foreign policy--like that ever meant shit for a republican candidate--and the democratic squabbling over square inches of sandbox turf deflect attention from the idiocies, inconsistencies, and gross misqualifications of that cyborg, mccain .... although that straight-talkin' lobbyist-humpin' payoff-takin' maverick-y septuagenarian kinda fun guy is gonna get a pass from our press, regardless of what he does ..... he could assfuck puppies while joe liebermann held 'em still but squealin', and he'd become the spca poster boy of the month ....

so .... what's the point, dr. pete? whatever is the point?

i guess the point is, i'm feeling some sense of urgency to stop dicking around and get things under way ..... i don't know about you, but i'm really tired of decades of the living dead in office and .....

etc. etc. etc. .... yada yada yada .......

next: dr. pete puts on the rubber gloves .....