President's Day

I hope the three day weekend was good for everyone! I had a good Pres Day. The weather was shit, but it was DocDay on the Sundance Channel (many documentaries), and they were partying for the holiday too, with a load of documentaries about how the Patriot act has infringed upon people's rights and has persecuted some for name alone (no lie, but y'all knew that) and how Bush is, um, bad. First was a documentary on the religious extreme right and politics. Ain't it funny how troublemaking presidents and other polticians all of a sudden reach out for televangelists in crisis? Nixon was I suppose morally torn apart when he invaded Cambodia and Laos instead of keeping his election promise to bring the boys home, so much so that he called on Billy Graham to help him through the rough patch. Ronald Reagan did this just before Nixon when he was Governor of California, and he had just had someone executed on death row, to the dismay of many, many protestors who camped out at his house. Billy Graham was definetly busy in the late 60's. Then came Jimmy Carter. The televangelists loooved him, you know the Southern Baptist thing. Then they found out Carter was for equal rights for women, and that put an end to that. Apparently, Bush said once that he should be "sittin on a bar stool in Texas...." and went on to say that it is the hand of God that put him where he is right now. I used to think my father was God, too. But I was 5. Next up was the Patriot Act documentary, which I caught half of, but just enough to see a woman tell how airport security people made her strip down to her skivvies in the middle of some mid-western airport because she was mistakenly on some flight risk list. They all had a nice chuckle, as did the people walking back and forth, to and from their gates. And then I heard about this guy going to college in DC, and while he was raised Catholic, he had a Muslim name, thanks to his father. So he gets to Philly, and little does he know that he too is on the flight risk list, and boom he's detained for hours with no explanation until the last 5 minutes of detention, kind of like the subway announcements, of course, and misses his flight. It was a coinkydink that the loyalties of most of the people on those lists were not with the regime, and let me just stop there lest I be detained for something during my lunch hour. You know, they should really at least send notices in the mail, saying something like "Dear Sir or Madam, Please note that your name has been arbitrarily picked out of a brown bag and placed on the national no fly/flight risk list. Please take precautionary measures in this regard. One would be not to ever go anywhere ever again. Another would be to keep your fucking mouth shut."

So this is the America we are left with. I really should have had a very good time ridiculing Bush and the deterioration of America due to his failure as a human being, plus the denigration of the name GOD by past, present and most likely future presidents and the evangelists themselves, in which the irony is so great, it is comical, and I should have felt even more elation at the fact that I am so not alone on this one that even cable channels with excellent reputations broadcast whole documentaries about it on a President's Day, no less. But I was left completely depressed. My dad said he got really upset just after the election, couldn't sleep right, and of course it was more about disillusionment at the amount of dumb-asses in this country. I feel the same way, but all those rednecks are just enablers, just as bad, plus they've always been there. I had come to expect just a tad more from the fucking POTUS, and I just had to stop and mourn for the lives, money, conscience, decency and international "cool" points that this country has lost, and because of JUST ONE GUY and pretty much, if you will all remember, on first impact. Moments like that make me want to really go ahead and move to France, where the president is Jacques Chirac, and his people only make fun of him because he keeps saying "naturellement" (naturally) to begin sentences, in that French traditional way, like they're schooling you on the basic rules of logic. Hey, maybe since I work at the UN I could put together a special political mission to Paris for intelligence and logic use and training and propose this to the US mission. Now that would be money well spent.

Speaking of intelligence, last week Bushy appointed H. E. John D. Negroponte, who looks very much like Monty Burns of Simpsons fame, as Director of Intelligence, or whatever the title is. Mr. Negroponte has previously served as US ambassador to the UN, and funnily enough, to IRAQ. In the eighties, for his activities in Central America, in which the US was just pinching off their final turd on Latin America, he earned the nickname "Butcher of Honduras." You know what, maybe I just didn't get the memo that the meaning of intelligence had changed to "hassling and/or killing people."