*Note. The State of the Union is tomorrow night. Less than half the number of people who watched the Super Bowl Halftime Show will tune in to hear what the leader of the Free-World (whatever that is) has to say. I thought I’d get a jump on him and give you the Low-Down, Down-Low, as the kids say, and explain why politicians have such strange bedfellows.
Oh yea, this essay is addressed to a ghost.
“The Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper sheathed.”– From, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Steven Vincent Benet
Mr. Webster, our nation is crap. We are stuck in a rut. We are a divided nation because we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by clever people with degrees in advertising and public relations who “frame” issues for television and radio sound bites. We are divided because we have given up critical thought for slogans, skepticism for inclusivism and understanding for indifference. We are a divided nation because we were granted an equal vote that we didn’t earn; a gift that half of us don’t use, but keep locked away in the closet like an antique gun that doesn’t fire in case of a break-in, and the half that do vote mostly follow the party-line because it’s easier to believe in a television network than to believe in ourselves.
Daniel, we are rich. Not all of us, but most of us. And, because we are rich, we can hire it done. We don’t have to do the heavy lifting of questioning how long this al Qaeda war is going to last or how much it will cost; don’t have anyone in the family that’s been killed or wounded in war. We trust politicians with friendly personas and capped teeth to look into why we pay so much more in health care than the rest of the world. Meantime, drug companies and insurance companies are making record profits. But who are you gonna shoot?
Dan, even though our country has more wealth in natural resources than any country on earth, more food-timber-minerals—our system of distributing this wealth, capitalism, has failed to keep a third of us out of poverty, and the disparity between folks with a lot and folks with diddy-squat has grown to the point of having two American economies; one economy based on drugs and guns and violence, neighborhoods draped with tattoo-parlors and tobacco stores and boarded up homes and rundown schools and drive-by shootings; and one with green lawns and summer vacations and flat-screen T.V. and college educations and weddings at the beach.
Danny, we are a divided nation because we don’t spend time with our neighbors. We think his name is Trace and her name is Maulva, not sure though. They’re not ‘friends’ on Facebook with us. Our friends all like guns or they all don’t; they all watch MSMBC, or they all don’t, Maulva may have kids, but they definitely have a dog. There is nothing homogeneous about us anymore; Trace could be a Martian and Maulva a communist or a socialist or a stock-broker?
Webie, will you take our case? When a wealthy man was on trial for his very soul he turned to you; the greatest orator and patriot of his time to win liberty. Our nation is crap. I think the devil has a stranglehold on our morality. We kill folks, indiscriminately from 10,000 feet, let mentality ill folks roam the city-streets, sell guns to anyone with thumbs, covertly invite Latinos into our cities to do the crap work and then threaten to kick them out if they want benefits, and build high schools with swimming-pools and stadium seating in their football palaces while, at the very same time, some schools can’t afford crayons for their kindergartens.
Sometimes, I think, our president smokes cigarettes before he addresses us. He has Harvard trained staffers writing for him, “framing” the argument to be sound-bitted on the 11:00 p.m. news. And the republicans are going to offer two responses to the president’s address; they have Ivy-League speechwriters too. They don’t smoke.
So look here, Danny-boy, will you plead our case to the rest of the world? Tell them we’re sorry. Tell them we’re a Christian nation, although, we don’t really believe in most of that crap. Tell ‘em we’ll pay for their forgiveness; we’ll rebuild all those buildings we bombed the crap out of, although that bridge that I drive across everyday squeaks and sways in the wind and could use a bolt or two tightened. I won’t pay. I don’t have the money, but I’ll bet that Maulva and Trace, or Kyle, or Todd or whatever-the-hell his name is will pay. Somebody damned sure is gonna pay. Crap.
Mike Ingles is from Duckrun, Ohio. Any questions?