After the Fireworks

Despite my better judgement, I actually sat about 20 yeards away from a real, honest-to-God, blow-em-up fireworks presentation on July 4. It was on the shores of Lake Buchanan, about 65 miles west, northwest of Austin, in the hill country. It was fun, noisy and colorful, and the two "presenters" were semi-pros at this; no one was hurt and everyone applauded. These same two pyrotechnical hobbyists also manufactured a large noise maker (they call it a "Salute"), which upon detonation merely creates a giant orange glow in the sky and leaves everyone nearby deaf for several minutes, afterwards. That monster went off at the local firehouse around 11 PM. Fortunately, there were no fire calls at that time, because all of the firemen in attendance couldn't hear a thing. During the evening, I was thinking, though, about two possible events which could have occured in today's world, but did not.

The first was that the DHS did not rush out to Lake Buchanan, in miniscule little Kingsland, TX, and arrest our two "bomb makers" as terrorists, under the Patriot ACT, for trying to blow up a fire station. I fully expected to to see Howard Chertoff in a hard hat, with the Army National Guard in humvees and heliocopters, but they never materialized. I was disappointed. And all of that so close to Crawford,too. A wonderful missed propoganda opportunity. They could have saved Dubya and preserved the peace of west central Texas. And spent millions in the process.

The second thought was that I was reminded of the warnings I'd been reading for weeks, from writers and bloggers on the far left, that the government would set off a "false flag" attack, to rally support for the bombing of Iran, by blowing up the Houston ship channel during the holiday festivities. By midnight, that had not yet occured. I'm still waiting. I don't trust anybody. And if it had happened, the boys at the fire house wouldn't have been able to hear it, anyway.

All the while, as the rockets produced red glares, and the bombs were bursting in air, all around the miles of shoreline around Lake Buchanan, I kept remembering that the Chinese had invented gunpowder. And as all of these explosive devices were going off, a little cash register in my head was calculating the increase in the US/China trade deficit and how much the cost of these fireworks were adding to the vast sums of money we already owe the Chinese banks for financing the war in Iraq (Ted Koeppel says it is somewhere between $600B and one Trillion. How the hell much is that?). Not that it matters, much: what could our national holiday have possibly cost us? I'm sure it was less than what we pay Halliburton a day for food a fuel in the desert or what we spend for electricity a day in the Green Zone. Or what it would have cost to save Kingsland, TX from the terrorists.

Life goes on in Texas