As we coerce the world into compliance with the dictates of our apocalyptic, untamed fire of freedom, unwanted insights arise. Here are some of mine. I'm sure that you've got yours.
I hope that you find them to be of interest.
Why is it that the pregame for any NFL Sunday contains more honest analysis and straight talk than the entire run up to the War in Iraq?
Why is it that people talk more seriously and more thoughtfully about the performance of running backs and pitching rotations than they do about the governance of their supposedly beloved native land?
I submit that is because we have been afflicted by an invasion of dangerous nut bags who are bent on reducing our country to an anti-intellectual, anti-rational, mystical wasteland. And I'm not talking T.S. Eliot here.
We're expected to hoot and holler and applaud like the cast of Hee Haw (who sang that annoying "nant-nant it" song way too often).
The borders of the United States were not created by God. Or even a close relative of God. They were thrown together by human beings who broke treaty after treaty with the original occupants. Therefore the borders are a bit capricious and the country's inhabitants are -- at best -- the oblivious offspring of thieves and liars.
Nationalism is a lesser emotion. One tied to arbitrary constructions invested with mythical obsessions and personal neuroses. Those flag lapel pins might as well say "damaged psychic goods: look out."
BTW, only authoritarian regimes have lapel pins with flags. Check it. It's true.
So why do Bush and his "coalition of the drilling" wear them? Because, as in so many other things, let's just face it, they were too lazy to even bother to find out if flag lapel pins were hallmarks of authoritarian regimes.
As our mountain-bike enthusiast-in-chief might say -- if he new who the following people were -- "If it was good enough for Francisco Franco and Marshal Tito...its good enough for me."
White male southerners (that is, our native terrorist class) should be stopped before they fully succeed in becoming beasts again. They successfully deprived millions of American citizens of their rights for several generations and they seem ready and willing to try it again. We ignore their hillbilly monstrations at our peril.
Films that discuss Charles Darwin cannot be shown across the South in IMAX theaters.
Why not just go the whole way and start putting up monuments to the Great Pumpkin and the Tooth Fairy in the courthouses? Why stop with the Ten Commandments? Let's erect a monument to Santa Claus and his benevolent treatment of children and his recent victory over those who made war on Christmas.
We all know about junk science - that is, science that actually requires reading a book - it has no place in the New South. As Senator James Inhofe of OK-lahoma pointed out -- those scientists are perpetrating a hoax on the American people worthy of the Nazi Party.
Right, Jim. And there's a secret door to the Wizard's Garden where happy unicorns dance in the mooon light. Etc.
The public education system of the United States of America was one of the greatest institutions in the history of the Human Species. Was.
How's about this. I like to call it a conundrum: George W. Bush lies and his whole delegation of lying flunkies also lie and they get tens of thousands of people killed and maimed and tortured and whatnot and we are told that the President should be re-elected and all of his flunkies promoted to even more senior positions of power.
Like I always say to my son: in the United States of America, hard work pays.
University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill wonders in print if the people who serve American economic and military power around the world cannot be compared to those who served in posts in the Nazi Regime (for the record, I find that a bit extreme...)
Proper response?
OMIGOD FIRE HIM! OH MY GOD FIRE HIM! FIRE HIM NOW!
Really, can you believe what he did? The S-C-O-U-N-D-R-E-L: he voiced an opinion identical to the opinion held today by a few billion people. Minimum. But we'd prefer that those billions did not have that particular opinion so we will pretend that no one could ever have had that opinion except a lunatic. Problem solved. Next firing?
Then I ask this: if most liberals, you know, the Al Qaeda wing of the Democratic Party, are a bunch of Islamofascist enablers, then, by definition, doesn't this country DESERVE to be attacked by, like, Denmark and Norway or some other anti-Al Qeada coalition who just want to be preemptive in defense of "the untamed fire of freedom"?
Couldn't they just say that they couldn't allow the USA to become a "failed state" run by Islamofascist dupes.
Could we disagree?
You know it and so do I: It's Insanity on Parade.