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| The Fat Lady |
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| and it ain't pretty |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, May 07, 2008. While the fat lady has not sung, yet, you can smell her talcum powder and lilac water as she oozes closer towards stage front in the Democratic Primary, inhaling nasal mucous deep into her skull’s cavernous interior and hawking phlegm to the floor between stage-whispered sustained notes of warm up. I’m afraid it’s going to be something by Andrew Lloyd Webber or Fleetwood Mac and not Puccini. Regardless, it looks very much like Barack Obama has, or is about, to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic party nomination, having swept North Carolina and barely losing in Indiana. If so, I cannot see how he can lose the Presidency absent huge racial bigotry. The fat lady clearly stands behind a defiant Hillary Clinton, with her exhausted husband - he of the quadruple cardiac bypass - stoically next to her. But I’m afraid I see her bulbous outline everywhere. What is awkward and unsaid about all this is defeating Senator Clinton is the most impressive thing Obama has ever done, which drips irony. I remain nervous because the next president follows George Bush, who despite his claims and postures has done more real damage to this nation than any enemy since the Confederacy. That isn’t hyperbole. He really has. Bush is such a fiasco that he utilized his wife to open our discussion of the Burmese cyclone disaster, now in progress. This, so embarrassing questions and enraging answers would not ruin his daughter’s wedding in Texas. The US has upped its contributions to about $3 million, last I heard, and while this pittance is augmented by the UN, to which we are the biggest contributor, it’s nothing, really. But there is hesitation all around, for considerations that – while not exclusively due to the Dubya years – were so exaggerated by them he gets and deserves the majority of blame. Because, just like he and other conservative nitwits discuss non-existent or unready US military units to send around the world while we currently fight two wars – which was a characteristic of the Third Reich in its last days – there is neither easy money, nor food, nor oil to send to any disaster area, including our own. The US is broke on its ass, in debt to China, and everyone knows it. Myanmar, formerly Burma, was a rice exporting nation, and even though population demands have sent rice stocks to record lows and prices to record highs, its about to get worse when their expected contribution to the rice harvest gets subtracted. We are about to see mass starvation on a scale unprecedented in human history. And there is very little we can do about it, and to preserve a civil society, millions will have to starve, or we all will. Bush’s retarded, and I mean that in the worst sense, retarded response to these long predicted and ongoing horrors is to merely turn the fate of the nation over to the very short-sighted corporate types who are always edging to profit from anything. Drill anywhere, discourage birth control, hype a form of patriotism so childish and shallow even the most conservative are embarrassed. The US economy has always been based, admitted or not, on the word of our highly competent government that the dollar was worth thus and so, and we could cover any run on the banks or any run on the stocks. I wonder if that is still true. What isn’t still true is a world ready to accept our assurances. Nobody, anywhere, believes much of anything the Bushies say about any topic. We cannot seem to win yet another war against cave dwellers and Third World religious patriarchs not because our soldiers aren’t terrific but because the stupidity of their civilian overlords – which is us, for electing who we did – found happiness in wishful thinking about our national virility and power. I can see the fat girl’s shadow behind our national media, as they try to conform stories into well-worn templates, always inaccurate, that they justify as making them understandable, by which they increasingly mean profitable. I see her behind every wedding industry advertisement, every moronic puff piece on family, every doomed sports star and entertainer and religious patriarch. I see her everywhere, and I rarely drink anymore. And I’d hate her more if she sings in celebration of a man who proves not up to the task, who was initially supported because people thought him attractive, who said the right things substituting hope for rationality and tough decisions to be made. Because if Barack Obama is not who his supporters are sure he is, and I so hope, we’re going down with no romantic afterlife and more finality than the Titanic serenaded by Celine Dion. And she wasn’t even fat. These are my opinions, not necessarily this station’s. I’d hope. |
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