Archive for September, 2009

UNTIED NARCISSISTS

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Wow! What a collection of leaders at last week’s United Nations conference in New York City.  Admittedly, a congregation that has in the past held no interest for me, I was at least a little bit interested this time, given the guest list and the precarious times in which we live.  Look, any time Iran’s supreme ruler Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is town, or “Mammy” as I like to call him, that’s a headliner.  Couple that with our own articulate master, Barack Obama, and the presence of those two alone warrants a peek.

Of course, they’re not alone.  This is a collection of “rulers” with no calibration benchmark.  Delegates and representatives, from countries the size of Texas, or Providence, Rhode Island.  Nonetheless, the collection of egos in that room must necessitate the pumping of helium into the chamber to keep them afloat.  Our own President notwithstanding, one glance around the room and the air of import is palpable.  Freud would have had a field day here.

But these are strange times.  That crazy little President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, let loose with the expected monologue straight from The Twilight Zone.  Denying the Holocaust occurred and the usual statements against Israel.  I felt as though a circus tent should have been erected over the entire affair, as at times it more resembled the freak-show lane at a grade-C carnival then a serious meeting of world leaders.  I waited in vain for the two-headed cow to be wheeled out.  I listened in pain as our own President stated how he wouldn’t “apologize” for America’s history of standing up for the victim of human rights violations.  Pained, that is, as I wondered where he was with these strong statements when citizens of Iran were being gunned down in the street following the outrageously corrupt election just months ago.

A few American and European delegates had the philosophical stamina to get up and leave, as did a few of Canada’s representatives.  Israeli prime minister Netanyahu blasted Mammy for the remarks and asked of the crowd that remained, “where is your shame?”  Where, indeed.

It would all be little more than silly were it not for the high-stakes in this game.  Iran and North Korea are building, or have built, nuclear bombs.  They are working, most likely feverishly, on a delivery system.  Roll that thought around on your tongue for a few minutes before you swallow, and realize the implications of either of these countries acquiring the ability to vaporize America, or large sections of it.  Then consider the emotional stability of the two guys whose tiny, in both cases, fingers will be on that button.  There’s nothing funny about it.  Only Netanyahu and a few others seemed to get it.

On the other hand, this is the land of Free Speech, and with a history of blood and treasure spent creating and preserving it, to prove it.  Still, nothing says you have to listen, and I fully respect those who left in defiance of such horrific remarks.  I, too, would have found myself hitting the pavement.  To hear Ahmadinejad saying “we welcome warmly any hand extended to us” is literally enough to make my blood boil.  As long as that hand isn’t attached to a Jew, I guess.  Or an American, or Christian, or…you get the picture.  Thus, the Fellini-circus atmosphere, bring in the clowns.  Yes, there’ll be plenty of room for hand-shaking once Israel is “wiped off the map”…another quote from the little man from Iran.

Look, I’ll be 52 in November.  When I was eighteen, like a lot of others, I spent a lot of time watching leaves fall in apple orchards, listening to Van Morrison, and staring at my palms for an inordinately long period of time.  Then, like a lot of others, I got older and started earning money and raising a family.  I noticed lots of money missing from my paycheck and a decaying morality that made me worry for my children, and I started paying attention.  Now, I’m listening to Van Jones, as well as Van Morrison.  Morrison makes me smile, Jones makes me wince.  Morrison is not going to fundamentally change the country in which I live.  Jones was engineering that change.

The little meeting in New York puts on full display, to those paying attention, the peril of our present and future.  It makes worrying about health care seem a little silly, frankly.  Without due attention paid to guys like “Mammy”, radioactive cities will be the next thing we’ll be worrying about, and you’ll only need health care if you break the third leg growing out of your torso.

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MY BLOOD

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

So, as if all of this were not enough, and the above is just the tip of the iceberg, the thing that bothers me most about this President and his cronies, is the New Racism they have introduced to America.

I wrote weeks ago about the Henry Gates incident, the Harvard Professor who accused a Cambridge, Mass cop of being a racist.  Our President went off teleprompter during a press conference on health care, just long enough to expose himself, when he said that the “Cambridge Police acted stupidly”.  Just animation away from being Reverend Wright himself.

Then, just days ago, during a joint session of Congress held to discuss, surprise, health care “reform”, a South Carolina Congressman, Joe Wilson, yelled out “liar” as the President reassured Americans that illegal immigrants would not be covered under this new plan, and that there would be no additional cost, or impact to existing access to quality health care.  Joe Wilson was launched to folk-hero status with Republicans and Grand Dragon status with Democrats.  Worse still, the President was being dishonest in his description of the reform bill.

While I felt that Wilson was out of line in yelling out while the President was speaking, he apologized promptly and was formally rebuked.  Yet that wasn’t enough.  Like the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have flocked to Town Hall meetings across the country and marched in Washington on September 12th, to voice their disagreement with the direction in which this country is being led, Wilson, like all of them, has been tagged a “racist”.

Even former President Jimmy Carter, whose brain seems to have turned into a peanut, announced that most Americans who are complaining about this administration’s policies, simply don’t like black people and especially a black president.  Joe Wilson, who I believe has four children who are either serving, or have served, in the military, must be biting his tongue.  Last time I checked, our soldiers protect, and serve with, citizens of all colors and ethnic backgrounds.  How obnoxiously smarmy to play the race card in this way.  And our President seems fine with it.  He has not addressed it, this prophet of “change” and “hope” and “unity”, even in the face of the most overwhelming evidence of all that we are not a racist country…his own Presidency.

And it is an assault on me and my blood as well.  My late father, who served in Germany during World War II, and raised his children to understand the ignorance of racism.  The impracticality of judging moral character based on skin color.  Not only was he not racist, he was vehemently opposed to bigotry.  One of the few people I have ever seen who would not stand for it in conversation, when an untoward comment might be made by someone, he would call them on it.  This was long before the Civil Rights movement and long before it was in vogue.

My children have been raised the same way and it is an assault on their character as well.  My blood.  And it is for this reason that beyond the mortgaging of their future with capricious spending and a corrupt government that continues to operate unchecked, that being labeled a “racist” because I disagree with the philosophy of this administration, angers me more than any of their policy decisions.

I’m confident that I’m not alone here.  And I will not forget or forgive what has happened here.  For the first time in my adult life, I’m beginning to feel a little racist, and I don’t like it.  But our President has me wondering, “is this how black people have viewed me all along?”  That all of us, every white American that didn’t vote for Obama or does not now fall in lock-step with his sheep, are racists?

How sad that in just these few months, race relations in America have been driven back decades, and there seems to be no end in sight.  How sad, and unusual, that of all the “high-thinkers” and enlightened operatives that surround this President, not a single one has pulled him aside and said, “Sir, perhaps it’s time to take one day off from your health care crusade, and address the other half of the country.  Not in your usual diminutive and demeaning way, but  with that promise of healing that was the centerpiece of your campaign.”  But then again, there would have to be one person who wants that to happen, and there would have to be a President who wants that to happen.  I don’t believe we have either one.

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AMERICA’S GOT TALENT

Monday, September 14th, 2009

…so why isn’t any of it in the White House?  What a week for President Obama.  First a nation-wide address to our school children, which sent many Republicans into a tail spin.  Personally, I was ambivalent.  While it’s easy to stretch the notion into some kind of indoctrination, clear-thinkers know that is ridiculous.  You want to see young children being indoctrinated?  Go to YouTube and Google “Middle-Eastern Pre-School”.  Obama was simply, in my opinion, sending a positive message to kids to stay in school, and using his personal experience to demonstrate why it is important.  I’m a little baffled as to why the opposite party always comes unhinged, just as the democrats did when President George H.W. Bush did the same during his tenure, except that that speech resulted in a call for an investigation by the General Accounting Office.  See…it cuts both ways.  Still, I think we weaken our legitimacy when we don’t pick and choose our battles.  Soon, it seems as though anything and everything Obama says sends people stomping into the streets.  At that point, you begin to look a little loony.

A more valid argument would center around the notion that Obama’s speech to school children was a coy political play meant to nestle into, or “spoon” with, his argument for health care given the next day to a very divided Congress.  I listened to the speech and was not sold, because the promises just fall on deaf ears for me.  It wouldn’t matter if it were a Republican administration, for me, personally, I just bristle when the government tells me they’re going to “fix” anything.  I picture Curly, the famous “Third Stooge” in the bathtub, “fixing” a leak, which is not a leak at all but simply  water pouring out of the faucet, as it is supposed to.  His answer is to add a length of pipe, which only moves the leak further away.  He adds an elbow, which only changes the direction of the leak.  By the end of the scene, he is completely encased in a cage of pipe and elbows, and of course, the water is still pouring out the end of the pipe.  His final solution, and this has “Federal Government” written all over it, is to drill holes in the bathroom floor to let the water out.

As the “Cash for Clunkers” program, which involved “only” 3 billion dollars and lasted a month was deemed a success because lots of cars got sold, the government has only reimbursed dealers for around 4% of the deals that were made.  Imagine them managing health-care?  Furthermore, the voting public is rapidly losing their trust in this President, and with good reason.  His management style and choices in personnel are a far cry from what was promised on the campaign trail.   Remember the famous reunion with Hillary in Unity, New Hampshire?  I’m assuming now that they simply couldn’t find Divided, Montana, because division seems to be the driving force here.

During the address to Congress he promised to “call-out” those who would spread false information about the health care bill.  In the same speech, he admitted that there are “significant details still to be ironed out”.  So, how would he ascertain whether or not information being disseminated was “false”?  They themselves don’t have the information yet.  He went on to say, in essence, that they are going to pass this bill, one way or another.  “Failure is not an option.  Not now.  Not this time”.  Pretty strong stuff.  I only wish he had been talking about his proposal to eliminate pork spending, or government corruption, or cleaning up child pornography and child predators, or beginning to track the money that has been spent on “stimulus”, you know, because we still don’t know where that trillion went.

Perhaps a comment or two on Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar who was quietly whisked out just after midnight on Saturday, Labor Day weekend.  A few words about how someone so racially polarized, who believes that 9/11 was a conspiracy and that planes never really were flown into the World Trade Towers, or the Pentagon, was about to be in charge of the expenditure of billions of dollars.

The President continues to govern as if he was still campaigning, with flowery but tough talk, but with little detail.  One can see why there were so many “present” votes during his brief tenure as a Senator, because he is loathe to unsettle anyone from his party, be they moderate or extreme.  Save that speech, because should a nationalized health care program be passed, it will resemble nothing that was outlined in that speech.  It can’t be done, and it won’t work.  He mentioned requiring “people who can afford it” to purchase health insurance.  Imagine, a government worker perusing your tax return, maybe visiting your home to inventory your belongings, and then rendering their decision on how much health care you will be forced to purchase.

America’s got talent but precious little of it ever ends up in the hallowed halls of the White House anymore.  As I tried to listen to Obama speak on Wednesday night, it was difficult to overcome the vision of Nancy Pelosi, and the sheer wonderment of how such a vapid, diminutive wretch ever came to a point where she is sitting behind the President of the United States.  At one point, someone yelled out during his speech and she perked up like a ferret on meth, grinding her jaws and squirming.  So unsettled she nearly blinked, and then Biden handed her a note, obviously with the name of the offender on it.  She glanced at the paper and then back into the crowd with that exasperatingly horrid countenance, staring like a mob boss at a card-counter, and I half expected an Anteater-like tongue to shoot from her mouth like a poison dart, out into the crowd, and just pull the head right off of that guy.

It’s sad, with the great minds that inhabit this nation, that we have to tolerate the slim pickings of the bottom of the barrel.  No wonder people are taking to the streets.  It’s frightening.

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IN THE OUTHOUSE

Monday, September 7th, 2009

At first glance, four years ago, Gary Moody seemed as though he might be the most dedicated husband in the universe.  Caught submerged in the business-end of an outhouse on the Kancamagus Highway in Northern New Hampshire, he claimed he was looking for his wife’s wedding ring, which had somehow been dropped into the pool of waste.  Further, or should I say, deeper, investigation revealed that Mr. Moody had been voluntarily submerged in the man-made tide pool for less honorable reasons.  Let’s call it a fetish gone awry, he was catching glimpses of the underside of unwary travelers.  Witness statements brought the unsavory story into broad daylight.

Naturally, at the time, the story made national news.  How is it that New Hampshire seems always to host criminal behavior that transcends even national stories?  That is no small feat, in this day and age. As a native, I am always singing the virtues of our fine state, and then…  Anyone who reads a newspaper or has seen the Gay parade in San Francisco knows that you really have to have your thinking cap on to break the glass ceiling of abhorrent behavior that as a nation we have become, sadly, used to.

We used to call New York the “City That Never Sleeps” and offers something for everyone.  Since then, we have become the country that never sleeps and offers something for everyone, with the possible exception of normal people who, as far as I know, want only a degree of normalcy in their surrounding life.  It’s getting hard to find.

Gary Moody escaped jail time on his first offense and one could argue that his ridicule in the public eye may have been punishment enough.  That argument, however, would have been laid moot this week as Mr. Moody was once again caught satisfying his urge for snorkeling in yet another outhouse in the White Mountain National Forest.  The excuse this time?  He dropped his shirt down there.  He went on to say, probably realizing that Jay Leno would need more than that for a monologue, that he had used his shirt to “wipe the seat, because those toilet seats are filthy…”.  Odd, the desire for sanitary conditions, followed almost immediately by a shallow swan dive into a place that most of us don’t want to look at, much less swim in.

It’s not all funny, though.  Mr. Moody is clearly a deeply disturbed man and one must wonder how far he is from being a dangerous, disturbed man.  This most recent event occurred at the Hastings Campground in Gilead, Maine, just a few miles from the New Hampshire border.  A woman first smelled trouble when her niece reported that there was “something going on in the outhouse”.  That claim raised a few eyebrows, but minutes later, when the same woman went in to check on her 9-year old son, the toilet suddenly lifted from the floor, and up popped Mr. Moody, out of the waste vault, saying simply, “Sorry, I was getting my shirt.”  Okey Dokey.

I hesitate to use the old adage that he may be in deep s**t this time, because he now has three Federal charges against him.  In the 2005 case, Northern Carroll Country Judge Pamela Albee remarked that he “deserved compassion”, and he does.  However, so does the travelling public, and the women and children whose privacy was violated in the most unlikely of places.

There is something unsettling that even in the remote woods of the glorious North Country, we should now peer down drain pipes to check for visitors before utilizing a public restroom.

One might think that with the endless supply and infinite categories of pornography that is available nearly everywhere, comprising a multi-billion dollar per year business, that it would no longer be necessary for one to grab their waders and swim fins to go looking for a good time.  Or, maybe, it is our allowance of, and the blind eye we turn towards, a truly wretched segment of our culture, that is creating the Gary Moody’s of the world.  One thing is for sure, it is yet another sad sign of the moral decay that we have, apparently, accepted as our collective fate.

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