Not feeling like a firecracker

July 4 is just two days away. Fireworks are null and void in most of central Texas: we have had no rain in weeks and the world is very brown and very dry. One good bottle rocket and your whole house and yard could be the neighborhood's largest hot dog and marshmallow fest.

The news has announced that on this Fourth, our National Shrub will be speaking to new citizens, being sworn in that day at Monticello: this raises hypocrisy to new levels. At the same time, Dick Cheney will be blustering about pirates ar some such nonsense, from the deck of the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor: another moment in the theater of the absurd. Had Bush and Cheney both stood on and for the real Constitution while they were in office, instead of shredding it, we wouldn't be facing the messes we are . This too, shall pass.

I said some time ago I would wait out the primaries and the general election to see who would win, then plot my course of action from there. I have learned much from McCain and Obama of late: I'm flip-flopping. While I was very relieved when the Democratic primary was over, Hillary threw in the towel and Obama became "presumptive", that relief has now given way to dismay and disillusionment. My enthusiasm for BO has gone from , Oh, Yeah! Right on!", to "Oh, well. If I have no other choice." I started becoming uneasy when he wrote a check from his supporter's donations to help out with the Clinton campaign debt. They have lots of money and they spent like drunken sailors. And he gives THEM a check? Maybe Barack is afraid of Bill. Then, as the press says, Barack's knees got "wobbly"on what to do about Iraq if elected, he has waffled and been decisionless about the FISA bill and possible prosecution, and now he is pandering to the religious right about faith based initiatives. First he seemed to moving to center stage, which is fine: we cold use some of that. But now he seems to be moving much farther to the right of the stage. Most of what I applauded and that I thought he stood for seems to be fading away as he works purely to garner votes and thereby sacrifice principals. As some have suggested, we really should make "character" an issue in this campaign. I feel somewhat betrayed, because Obama, like MCCain, seems to be becoming one rather than having any. I was reminded by two articles this morning, that I should not forget that he is a politician. Oops. My "wait and see" attitude has become more of "wait and worry". Pandering to evangelicals pushes me about as far as I can go without coming completely unglued. Too bad. Alas, poor Obie. I thought I knew him well.

What follows is the latest installment in what happens when my fingers get stuck in the keyboard. One early reviewer denounced it as much too long and my son decried it as much too dreary and pessimistic. Grab a new cup of whatever you are drinking, and read on if you are brave and stalwart:

The United Jurassic States of America

An Allegory (?) in Memory of George Carlin.

When my youngest son was very small, even before he could read well, dinosaurs were his best friends. From his first introduction to these human precursors, he had a strong kinship with them. We bought and read books about them, he looked at the pictures, drew pictures of them and built skeletal models. If we could get to a museum, to see an assembled fossil, we went, and any even remotely relevant television program was a must see. He (we) marveled at them, fantasized about them and made up a terrible and unending strings of “saurus” jokes all the time.: “My triceratops yours”; “Move your big bronto butt over so I can sit down”; “you must have a brain the size of a walnut”, “Clean up your room. What are you, mesosaurus wrecks?”etc. And if Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble had lived next door, Nick would not have given them a second thought.

But certain aspects of being “dino-aware” demanded awe and respect. There was never any denying the impressiveness of the really big ones, like the brontosaurus: it towered over everything; you had to pay homage to the king, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and marvel at his teeth and his speed. The warriors of this society commanded attention as well, the varied ancestors of the rhinoceros, with their heavy plating and horns, and tails lined and rowed with deadly spikes. And some were even reported to fly (dactyls ?). Some were the first stealth predators (remember Jurassic Park?), the dreaded raptors (we have fighter planes named for them, today) and some were merely content to loll about, eating greenery. They were the first vegans, I guess.

But carnivore, herbivore or omnivore, on land, in the water or in the sky, they made their mark on the face of the earth for millions of years and later re-appeared in stone and imprint to captivate the minds and imaginations today of scientists, anthropologists and young children like my son. But they went extinct. Oops.

The reason for recalling such memories and the many images of these early creatures was that I was busy looking for a symbol, a metaphor or a suitable collection of word pictures to use to describe the United States of America, today. It, too, has many forms and descriptions, has many aspects and behaves in many different ways, on and in the land, the water and the sky. It is leaving its mark and its impressions on the face of the earth, as well. It is attracting attention and captivating the minds of scholars, politicos, historians, the general populations of the world, and, for now, at least, contemporary cultural anthropologists. Some day, if we manage to do our worst, the children and grandchildren of these curious groups may well be the kind of anthropologists that sift through the remains, skeletons and remnants of what once was here, in an attempt to figure out what we (The United States of America) once was. They will, some days hence, be looking to discover what we did, what we stood for, stood against and what we did about it. They will examine our (possibly charred) fossilized remains, look at our WMD’s, rifle through our vast accumulated waste and search for the answer to the question of why we (the US of A) went extinct (this is a lot like the phrase “went missing”, used in today’s inaccurate vernacular, but far more serious. You can sometimes be found and recover from being missing. Being extinct is far more permanent. Ask a dodo).

Put rather simply, the United States of America was born somewhat abruptly.If you look at the short span of space and time of human existence, the US emerged almost over night. In the grand scheme of events, from the first thirteen oppressed colonies, it appeared as a nearly full-grown bird of freedom almost instantaneously. The mark left behind by its birth changed the face of the world. The Founding Fathers were propelled by their indignance and resentments, their zeal and their collective intellect, to say, “Enough. No More. George, go home! And stay there!”. Supported by the keen desire for liberty and the compounded robust and restless ire of the people, and motivated by the then radical notion that “all men are created equal”, the great bird took to the sky and vanquished the oppressor. The revolution dawned a new day. Funny, that today, many are again saying, “George, go home. Stay there”. Déjà vu.

Wow! What a great story! An epic adventure in humanity! A monumental triumph! What an inspiration!

However, 200 hundred years have passed and that revolution has faded. Some say we have been asleep, off duty, unaware. It has given way to a reverse evolution, a de-volution. The great symbol of liberty, freedom, success and equality evolved backwards from an eagle to a dinosaur. Almost imperceptibly to some, time began running rearwards and the behemoth, lumbering beast of the Jurassic past came back to life. This “saurus”, however, is not so loveable or loved.

Unlike the extinction of the first dinosaurs, which occurred when Mother Nature and the universe arbitrarily decided to pummel the earth with a giant asteroid (if you subscribe to that theory: my son and I do). This event caused enough cold and darkness for long enough to starve out every living thing (almost) and life nearly had to start from scratch. Life as a dinosaur was mostly fun until that happened. The end of their existence was not their fault. They never saw it coming or had a clue. Suddenly, someone had to ask, “Who turned out the lights?”, and “Where did my lunch go?”

Note: If you are a believer in or practitioner of Intelligent Design, this would be a good time to stop reading .If you have any visions of an early George W. Bush, riding a saddled dinosaur around the early Texas range, rounding up prehistoric cattle or chickens for dinner, you will not find any comfort or solace in this piece, from this point forward. It just gets to be more like real biology and Darwin. Sorry.

This was a sad and unfortunate, non-storybook ending for the Jurassic Park inhabitants, but it need not hold true for this modern day dinosaur called the United States of America. At the moment, there is no one, giant asteroid on the galactic horizon, that we know of. But our dinosaur has some internal tumors and ulcerations that require immediate attention. There are also some outside extremists and agitators, a few meddling boneheads and the usual assortment of idolaters and misguided icon worshippers (bureaucrats) lurking about, but there always have been. If we are lucky, they usually die from a lack of attention as the health of the afflicted beast improves. Despite the last nearly eight years, we still have some available medications that will help: common sense, rules of law, a Constitution and some remaining shreds of democracy. And therapists are standing by to take your call, should you want to join in the cause: philosophers, historians, educators, scholars, ethicists, and an educated public. Many of us truly believe that most of the smaller, current and short-sighted habits of this beast are fixable with time. But the bigger public behavior problems, the eating habits and the extremely impaired vision problems of this creature are going to be hard to tackle. And they certainly cannot be addressed all at once. That would require major surgery, aka, another revolution, and it doesn’t seem like America is quite ready for that. At least not just yet. Besides, you don’t just “move” something this big, overnight.

Working from the inside, out.

Our big, lumbering mammal’s organs are all sick. Any physician worth his mettle will tell you that nothing that manifests itself on the outside of a sick being will be pleasant, as long as the insides are not well. All thinking and behavior is adversely affected by the illnesses within. So we go first to the brain of old saurus, which, like those of all dinos, is quite small, limited in capacity and able to deliberate only very slowly. The poor thing suffers from believing that it is an all-powerful “megasaurus” and doesn’t even know that it processes information at only a snail’s pace, and its little brain has become almost completely ineffective, when it comes to problem solving. Its arteries (the halls and offices of congress and the federal agencies) are clogged with inept elected officials (aka, dolts), incompetent political appointees (FEMA) and lobbyists (robber barons). It is almost pure administrative cholesterol. Blood thinners and anti-coagulants in the form of more open, less expensive and more aggressive elections would help all that. But something needs to be done soon. And don’t call in the drug companies to help; it will cost too much , take too long to test and evaluate, be subject to approval by the same government that needs the treatment (it is in denial) and will no doubt have bad side effects. If you leave it up to this “brain”, the cure will never get to market. There is too much money at stake. To remove the lobbyists alone, you would need to flood K Street with something which is a total disincentive for personal gain. There are some remedies on the market which can help. These include virulent doses of humility, a ban on limo services, no free lunches (or vacations in Ecuador or Paraguay) and certifications that the participants are both germ and slime free. And a general tax on greed. All tough to pull off, but doable if these clowns are all subject to evaluation by a new and sanitized EPA. We have the technology; we just have to use it. It is all outlined in a book called “Ethics”. I know we have a copy, somewhere.

A small but especially troublesome (and troubled) corner of the brain is called the Executive Branch. Both its’ East and West wings appear broken and it hasn’t flown for some time. Before it flounders around on the floor any more, or leaves behind more remnants of misguided loyalty feathers, the whole area should be scrubbed, flushed out and sanitized. This is particularly true for the chairs of the POTUS and Vice-POTUS: these held the resident WMD’s. The entire branch should be made ready for new blood, fresh air and less accumulated fecal matter. Weapons, bald-faced lies, self-delusion and cowboy arrogance should be eliminated completely. Clear out all the brush.

Once this is done, there will be less chance that the Judiciary enclave, or the mysterious “mental rule book and cloakroom” of the brain, will tip any further to the right. Although small, this component of the brain has the ability to bring the whole beast crashing to the ground if it gets any more lopsided. And if dino goes down completely, well, there’s that extinction thing again. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” will echo around the world.

Somewhere, buried under all of this mess in this troubled brain, is an item labeled, “The Constitution of These United States.” When we find it again, (it has been under wraps for about seven years), we should be very careful not to lose it again, spill anything on it, blur it or alter it in anyway. THIS IS THE COLLECTION OF CAREFULLY CRAFTED DEMOCRATIC THREADS, PROVIDED BY THE FOUNDING FATHERS, IN WHICH THE FUTURE BALANCE HANGS. ITS’ CONTENTS ARE THE BEST AND FINAL DEFENSE AGAINST EXTINCTION.

Other Vital Organs

By all reports, and according to some recent medical prognostications, the heart of the dinosaur is still beating. But within the last 100 years, it has done itself no favors, health-wise. For openers, it has become the worst of all possible omnivores. It can’t think very well, but it sure can eat. It devours everything in sight: natural resources, clean air and its sources, huge quantities of oil, human energy and civil liberties. The seemingly unending desire to consume the elements of the high life, private airplanes, most of the world’s food stuffs and energy, expensive automobiles and prime real estate has pushed the liver to its limits and starved the stomach for nutrients. The military industrial complex drives even more consumption and the imbalance of sustainable trade is leaving the body muscles weak. The muscles, the tendons, the plasma, the electrolytes and whatever else it takes to keep this dinosaur upright and moving consist of the people who live inside the beast, the populace. They strive to convert whatever raw energy is left, after the military and the corporations and the diplomats are done, into useful products, capital and the replenishment of sustainable resources. It takes more and more effort every day for the dinosaur to just walk, and it has grown obese, cannot turn and adjust quickly and relies mostly on fond memories of when it used to be lithe, slim and attracted the fond attention of the rest of the world. Those days appear to be gone, forever. And the muscle and the tendons and sinew and the bloodstream cannot live on bread and water forever. If you just keep gorging the liver on an empty stomach and clogging the arteries, you are asking for a heart attack. I doubt there is a single defibulator big enough to jump-start this once athletic behemoth.

There are other complications involved if we take dino into rehab. Lately, because he was told there isn’t enough oil, he has taken to drinking large quantities of ethanol. Everybody else in the world saloon may be doing it too, but it is bad for the liver, causes an equally expensive drunk and puts a crimp in the corn supply/food chain. Along with the ethanol, dino has swallowed the story that there isn’t enough oil, that “peak” oil is here and that we have to go drilling in places we shouldn’t to get more. It’s too cold for dinosaurs in the ANWR, and dinos can’t really swim, so the coastal shelf is out, too. Those K Street lobbyists in that brain that needs flushing have clogged up some more arteries with big oil money; the drunken dinosaur has been convinced he needs a new, different and more expensive fix. He is wobbling down the street, gazing lustfully at nuclear reactors, and has also just discovered he is not the only creature in the neighborhood. It seems there is another dinosaur waking up in China and one in India. They are also both omnivores and both like oil. China’s dinosaur is healthier, has more muscle to flex and more money to throw around. Sadly, most of that money came from OUR dinosaur in the first place. What goes around comes back to Chinese banks.

As the dino wobbles, he is inhaling lots of toxic fumes, because the brain has been ignoring the warnings of the EPA and the Al Gore influences for a long time. The dinosaur has a smoking habit, refuses to try nicotine gum and this entire foul intake is making all the people and the planet sick. American Dino and his Chinese soulmate are exhaling CO2 at a great rate. But the brain likes smoke filled rooms, so no one is paying attention. And the big energy boys from K Street are in there, puffing away.

The rest of the problem

Bringing the dinosaur back to good health is one mighty and noble goal. If that can be achieved, the next round of challenges have to do with what to do about how the beast has interacted with the rest of the planetary neighborhood. The dinosaur has very large feet, poor vision, a large dangerous spiked tail, bad spawning habits and a real knack for alienating other dinosaurs and people in general.

In wobbling around, the big feet have stepped on many people, countries and governments that didn’t invite the intrusions. Civil rights and liberties have been abused, wealth misappropriated, resources plundered and entire cultures mauled. In the wake of the beast’s wandering, the tail has lashed back and forth behind it, often leaving death and destruction, havoc and despair. And the wandering path has been global. Please remember that this dinosaur does not bear young: it only lays eggs. And most of the eggs it has laid have gone rotten. Very few have hatched new freedoms or great birds of liberty like ours once was. While having no inkling of some of the devastation left in its wake, our dinosaur is also not popular around the world. Perhaps most sadly, the fact is that the dinosaur’s own vision of itself is so weak and inaccurate, that it has no clue how poorly he (it) is perceived on the world stage. By the way, this “selective perception” also allows dino to ignore misery in its own back yard. This is another vision problem. Look in Wikipedia under “Katrina”. In addition to the fixes and cures mentioned earlier, dino could use a good optometrist.

In the last of what has been nearly a decade, this “brain’s ” behavior has been particularly disruptive in this regard. Its vocabulary (“speechifyin”) and social skills (unsolicited back rubs) from the executive branch, have been below par and disgusting. Both the executive and legislative branches have co-opted and abused the MSM to the point where no outlay of information is credible or to be trusted. The “brain” is convinced it can tell the American people anything, and they will accept it as gospel, “good news”.

But the good news is increasingly the bad news. The rich get richer and the poor get even less than they used to. And the middle class is vanishing into the bowels of a dinosaur totally unaware of their role in the possibilities of survival and the avoidance of extinction. What’s that you say, “SO?” Thank you, Dick.

Expats leave every day, in mourning of the imminent passing of an old friend. They leave a country that once trumpeted the word “freedom” louder than any country on earth. They are being replaced ever more quickly by immigrants leaving behind lost hopes and dreams and dreaming anew that the dinosaur here will save them from despair and nothingness. They have no clue it is dying because its skin still looks attractive and superficially glamorous. Ah, Hollywood. Thank you, Madison Avenue. But unless the cures are implemented soon and the rejuvenation process begins quickly, it will be as if another meteor has struck. I have no idea who is going to turn the lights back on, this time.

Postscript

The following thoughts were running through my head, and jotted down on paper next to me, as I wrote the piece above, but I did not include them at the time, for reasons of length. I also thought it might be too many dreary observations for one article. But after sleeping on it, I decided, “Why not?”, so here goes:

The exact moment (unknown) when the cosmic forces of nature chose to pull the plug on the dinosaurs, the meteor collision with earth created a huge cloud of dust and atmospheric debris that encircled the earth. At least that is what most scientists think what happened. The climatological result of this was a cloud cover which effectively blocked out the sun’s rays for an extended period of time, thus creating an extremely long “winter” on earth. Not long thereafter, the plant life died off and the food source for the herbivores died with it. Not long after that, the herbivorves died off, and because there was no McDonald’s or Burger King for T-Rex to stop at, the food source for the carnivores died off, too. Thus endeth the tale of the dinosaurs. Or so I understand it.

A few years back, a small oil-producing country in the middle east, led by a despot and dictator, was reported to have “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD’s). Because they were supposed to pose a threat to the security of the United States…and because of several other bogus claims made by the brain of our dinosaur… we attacked that country, deposed the dictator, oversaw his execution, and killed (and are still killing) countless civilians while making countless thousands more homeless. We have been engaged in “hostilities” there ever since (“hostilities” sounds bogus, too). And there were no WMD’s. The dictator was not guilty of this charge…..but we only verified that much later. Too late. Dead. Extinct.

Recently, for some newly “revealed” reasons, which may well be bogus as well, we have accused yet another small, middle eastern, oil producing country of aiding and abetting the 911 hijackers, supplying arms and munitions to insurgents in the first country we invaded and just generally being disagreeable. Dino seems to think that any time you cannot pronounce someone’s name, you should wag your spiked tail. There are more than a few rumors of war, as well as verifiable evidence, that the United States, in its best dinosaur clothing, may well soon bomb that country as well. (We seem to want to wag that big, dangerous tail, some more).

Part of the rumors, again partly verifiable, insist that we might use something called “tactical nuclear weapons” to conduct this proposed bombing. Sound interesting? Read on.

Everything that I have been able to read tells me that “Tactical Nuclear Weapons” (TNW’s) are still just nuclear weapons. Tactical or not, they are indeed WMD’s. Once you detonate one, there is not much control over what happens afterwards. It is a hideous fire bomb of an explosion, Hiroshima all over again, and the fallout afterwards is deadly, long lasting and unpredictable. I could be wrong, but it sounds to me like the United Jurassic States of America is about to kill and make homeless another several thousand innocent people. The ailing dinosaur is about to use WMD TNW’s on a country which doesn’t have any verifiable WMD’s at all, after basically destroying a country for having WMD’s it didn’t have in the first place. . Are you following this?

Incidentally, the Vice-Potus of the brain is reported to have recently ordered the covert shipment of WMD TNW’s from North Dakota to Florida, over American dinosaur soil, for imminent shipment, to an “undisclosed location” for use against the country that doesn’t have any WMD’s that we know of. I didn’t know the brain was capable of being either that smart or covert. You learn something new every day. But since they got “found out” (something like “went missing”), does that mean it’s not covert anymore? Or “undisclosed’?

The link to the story above:

The first dinosaurs became extinct because they could not survive an extended, cold, dark, sunless winter. If the great, lumbering dinosaur of the United States chooses to instigate the use of WMD’s in the form of Tactical Nuclear Weapons…a horrid, despicable, cowardly act…. both large and small dinosaurs (China, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia) around the planet could opt to retailiate and/or join in the fray. These detonation of these weapons will cause the atmosphere to fill with dust and debris and cause a dark, cold nuclear sunless winter. You can figure out the rest of it for yourself. The lights will not come back on for along, long time and you can forget all about all of those suggestions I made earlier about restoring the dinosaur to health. ‘Night, George.

Life goes on in Texas.