New Day, Same Worries

I’m not sure if I should be concerned.  All I wrote yesterday was a couple of sentences that didn’t even begin to describe my gastrointestinal distress, and I had more page views than on Friday, when I spent a couple of hours trying to somehow wring some meaning or at least entertainment value out of the week’s celebrity gossip.  Maybe I should hint at colonic catastrophe more often.  Perhaps that’s my niche market.  I could do worse.  Hell, Eve Ensler made a name for herself with talking vaginas (which would be the best ventriloquism act in Vegas if someone hasn’t already done it) and Jeanie Linders made it to Broadway singing and dancing through the joys of menopause.  So I could just as well score big with the “Diarrhea Digest”…maybe corner the whole Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis market.  Just thinking out loud here.

I often find myself writing columns in my head as I’m doing something else, pretty much my only version of multi-tasking.  I was doing that this morning as I was sitting on the recumbent bike at the Y, listening to my “Caribbean Queen” channel on Pandora and watching Ben Affleck being interviewed on the CBS Morning News.  That column kept hitting a roadblock in my head.  Maybe it’s just that I can’t make myself care about why Ben Affleck should or shouldn’t be Batman…since Affleck is an actor and Batman doesn’t exist…and if he did, he’d be Adam West (same bat-time, same bat-channel).  Meanwhile, there were half a dozen issues in the morning news that seemed like reasonable column-fodder, but none stand out enough to get their own 600-800 word treatment.  Let’s just hit the high (or mostly “low”) points:

Does someone in the Secret Service want the president dead?:

It sure seems like a good conspiracy theory, and the evidence is piling up.  Back when I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was “The Wild Wild West”.  Robert Conrad played James West, a secret service agent with the 1870’s version of James Bond’s array of gadgets and the same Bondian inability to die even when the bad guy held a gun to his head while suspended over a pool of hungry piranhas.  I’m guessing James West could single-handedly have stopped one lunatic with a knife from jumping the White House fence, dashing across 168 feet of clear, perfectly manicured Kentucky blue grass, and getting all the way to the East Room, all while a couple dozen guys with M-16’s, sniper rifles, tasers, motion detectors, heat detectors, radar, attack dogs, and Stinger missiles uniformly stood motionless with their collective thumbs firmly inserted in their collective butts.  These were the same guys who, in 2011, apparently mistook seven shots from an assault rifle fired at the White House for backfires from a truck, figuring that the shards of plaster raining down on the Truman Balcony were just pigeon poop or a structural issue.  Look, if these maroons were working for Kim Jong Un, they’d right now be roasting over a slow fire in the palace garden, soon to be served with a little kimchee.  American exceptionalism?  Really?

While you were worried about ISIS coming to kill you, the stuff really coming to kill you came:

This is the column I started yesterday and abandoned when it was clear to me that pain and weakness was making me incoherent (or at least more incoherent than usual).  Look, we’re currently bombing the living shit out of Syria.  Yesterday there was a headline on AOL that trumpeted: US-Led Airstrikes Hit Syria’s Largest Gas Plant, as if that was something we were supposed to feel proud about over our morning coffee.  If not your morning coffee, maybe it should be the Kool-Aid, since that’s the crap we’ve been fed about ISIS plotting to bring down the homeland…as if they, or whichever other group we pick out to target on a particular bombing run, is just moments away from launching their bombers, ICBM’s, navy, cruise missiles, or six armored divisions, none of which they have…which is why they spend all their time and money on developing ever more sinister versions of exploding jockey shorts.  This while we extract our revenge for a couple of staged video murders, all the while failing to appreciate that smart bombs, cluster bombs, Hellfire missiles, and fuel-air explosives behead ten times more human beings, including women, children, and passersby, than any single balaclava-clad son of a bitch in the whole Middle East.

Meanwhile, in a real crisis we can’t solve with high explosives, over 3,000 souls have perished in Africa from Ebola, with no signs of a slow-down and no indication from anyone that there is a light at the end of this very dark and deadly tunnel.  Already, any number of the doctors and nurses caring for these patients have themselves succumbed to the disease, showing with great clarity that the most stringent precautions sometimes fail to prevent a ten micron murderer from finding a way through double gloves and eye shields and rings of duct tape.  Which brings us to Dallas, where a patient is currently quarantined and being tested for Ebola.  No matter what Sanjay Gupta tells you, there is no reason to believe that Ebola won’t eventually find a foothold in the US and Western Europe, and while US patients seem to currently have a better chance of survival than African patients, that’s only because there’s so few of them.  This thing isn’t even near to being over.

I hate to say “I told you so”, but I told you so.  Riots are coming to a community near to you:

The grand jury hearing the evidence in the Darren Wilson shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri is on the verge of making a decision.  All the signs point to Wilson not being indicted for murder, manslaughter, or at even reckless endangerment.  Nope, Wilson, like so many cops before him (see under: Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by four cops…who walked away free men) will in all likelihood be declared innocent of any crime…just doing his job.  The police in Ferguson are already gearing up for the inevitable backlash from this injustice.  The concentration isn’t on the business of making things right, but of keeping people who want to make things right from having a voice to do so.  Ferguson’s finest have been busy busting protesters for violating the “five second rule”, which give’s demonstrators just that long to move when ordered to so so by anyone with a badge or face time behind bars.  Once the grand jury decision is announced, I have a feeling they’re going to need a much bigger jail.

It just keeps getting more insane.

BW