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| FREE PETE, BUT KEEP BUFFY A FEVERISH VIEW OF CURRENT EVENTS AS 2003 SPLITS OPEN LIKE A BURNT WEENIE |
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| 'People talk about discretionary time on their cellulars when they should throw them under a garbage truck and do what they want." -Jim Harrison From OFF TO THE SIDE: A MEMOIR |
| Reading this Jim Harrison memoir is just about the only worthwhile activity I've been able to undertake this entire year so far. I'm lucky if I can read a dozen books in a year anymore, and that is, of course, my own fault. 2003 is starting out to be a real doozy, or floozy, or something. Fifteen days into it as this is being written and I've spent about 12 days with fever and disease, made a trip to the hospital emergency room, been baked and blasted by hot Santa Ana winds, missed every day of waves so far, plus the others... Penned in at home, watching friends and family explode into flames or ice as the individual cases may be. The media is the only input source, sadly, with the very odd and unwelcome exception of phone calls and letters. In the real news we have a President who seems insistent on going to war for reasons that really aren't clear to the citizens. He's asking for one hell of a lot of faith, and if the U.S. does go to war there had better be proof something truly evil was happening or Mr. Bush will be unemployed in 2005. Speculation runs from Iraq hiding OBL to Hussein having some advanced Nuke/Bio capability, but it's all just speculation at this point. While a major push for war is on from the sitting administration, a couple of Congressmen chose this time to crap all over the military by demanding that any military casualties have to be apportioned by race, and introduced legislation to that effect. There is probably a rider on the legislation to build rec rooms in their districts and to fund cancer cures, just to position other lawmakers. So many Congressmen and women are so freaking stupid and evil that it's hard to tell what these bozos are really asking for. If we were to follow their logic it might run something like this (Hey, look, fever down to 99! - Ed.): Combat in Iraq. 500 KIA, 1200 wounded. Racial breakdown is 20% KIA of African-American heritage. General population is 12% of African-American heritage. Same figures for wounded. Solution: Figure out equivilent hard numbers of individuals to percentage difference of general population and statistic (8% in each case). Send death squads to private colleges across America to execute at random the required number of Anglo-American male students. Other squads can go at random to shopping malls across America and shoot young white males in the kneecap to achieve parity for the wounded. A win-win solution, brought to you by Congressmen Charles Rangel and John Conyers. You can't make this crap up... So while this little news bit slides through without comment, the regular news media outlets endlessly run heartbreaking stories of families being torn apart as a parent is being called to duty or being deployed in advance of this possible War On Iraq. There are many tears shed, and it's all very moving and quite real for that matter. It's the actual coverage which seems skewed. It's an all volunteer military now, and unless I'm way off base most military people have been educated as to their mission. A simple dictionary would suffice to educate anyone, in their preferred language, but sadly this essential learning tool is falling out of favor in most households. Microsoft can tell them how to spell, and television tells them what to think, so a dictionary isn't seen as a necessity. THEIR IS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT... |
| Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. ***** |
| January 7, 2003: Once in a while we are going to feature older articles which seem to have current resonance, and this one fits. "Buffy" is gone, although looking good in reruns, but "The Draft" has been dusted off again and Pete Rose is back in the news. No to mention this article got the boss in hot water when it first went up. -Al |