The Sporadic Curmudgeon

This is the 35th anniversary of the first manned moon landing in 1969. The most incredible thing the human species has ever accomplished, and not one single person I spoke to today remembered it.

When I was a kid, there were still people around who thought the idea of going to the moon was a crazy, impossible dream. It was a dream with great cost in money and lives.

I watched them get out of that rickety lunar module and climb down the ladder. I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon. I heard the first words ever spoken by someone standing on a world he had not been born on.

“It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

You all know them; they have been dulled by repetition. But to us, then, watching TV that hot and glorious July, those words revealed a destiny we had never dared imagine. We little fragile apes had ridden a pillar of flame to another globe. We were seeing a new, no, an alien horizon, and dreaming very, very big dreams.

Neil, Buzz, Michael: some of us will never forget. Good going, guys.
And to Gus, Ed and Roger: you should have been there. Requiat in pacem.

Boy, those Tennesseans really know how to celebrate. On his 23rd birthday, a Maryville, Tennessee man went on a nude rampage while covered in nacho cheese. According to the Maryville Daily Times, he was apprehended at 3:38 AM while sprinting naked and be-cheesened across a swimming pool parking lot toward his Jeep, which contained clothing and an open bottle of vodka. Further investigation revealed that:

…someone had climbed an 8 foot fence, broke into the snack bar through a window, ransacked the facility, left the freezer door open and caused $100 damage by ripping the water heater from the wall, according to a report.

Authorities reported someone also defecated in a garbage can, threw nacho cheese on the exterior wall of the snack bar and scattered chips on the ground outside the facility.

Wow.

All I did after some immoderate intoxicant ingestion on my 23rd birthday was indulge in a pleasant dalliance with two generous young women of friendly disposition.

Dammit. I could have had cheese with my floozies!

If you’ll kindly shift your eyes to the left side menu, you’ll see a new section: Great Time-Wasters, devoted to those websites that somehow make you stay up way past your bedtime in spite of your better judgement. I’ve piled a whole bunch of the time-suckers on one page to help ease the crushing vortex of meaninglessness all of us feel lurking just under the surface of every waking hellish minute we’re forced to exist in this grotesque slaughterhouse of a universe. Bon appetite!

From the “didn’t completely think this one through” department: a Dunedin, New Zealand charity event to raise money for a local ambulance service became even more of a painful ordeal than usual when 28 people were injured attempting to break the Guinness world record for firewalking. (Note: site nags you about upcoming registration requirements.)

Although they managed to raise $NZ1,000 for the ambulance service, the service itself was forced to treat its supposed benefactors for burns, which ended up costing significantly more than the amount raised.

You’d think that after the seventh or eighth person started screaming, they’d start to have second thoughts about stepping into the pit. If someone videotaped the proceedings, though, I imagine the ambulance service could easily make up the shortfall and then some. I know I’d pay to see it.

Just hours after writing my last post in which I question whether the Bush Administration will allow the election to take place this fall, I find this little horror story on MSNBC/Newsweek. It reports that Tom Ridge has asked the Justice Department to provide a legal justification for suspending the election in case of terrorist attack.

I’m sure this is all just theoretical, though. Like Justice’s memos about torture were just theoretical.

Remember the words of CIA veteran Ray McGovern in his interview with Democracy Now:

I say all this because I am more frightened now than at any time over the last three and a half years, that this administration will resort to extra-legal methods to do something to ensure that there are four more years for George Bush. And Ashcroft’s statement last week, gratuitous statement, uncoordinated with the department of, CIA, with the Department of Homeland Security, his warning that there is bound to be a terrorist strike before the US elections. That can be viewed and this can be reasonably viewed as the opening salvo in the justification for doing, taking measures to ensure that whatever happens in November comes out so that four more years can be devoted to maybe changing that war crimes act or protecting at least these vulnerable people for four more years.

This is something that’s been rumored for a couple of years now, but generally dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theory. Tom Ridge himself has moved the scenario into the realm of possibility.

This administration crosses the line with all the reticence of a coke whore hitting her knees. The New Republic is reporting the Bush mafia’s latest outrage: they have been heavily pressuring the Pakistani government to produce a high-value terrorist during the Democratic National Convention. Choice quote:

But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

The rotten apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree in this case; it’s reminiscent of the “October Surprise” allegedly orchestrated by his father in 1980.

There’s only one reason people cheat: they know they can’t win otherwise.

Assuming we even have an election this fall, it’s way past time our body politic vomitted this nauseating filth all the way back to Texas. Register to vote.

This is the day we celebrate our nation’s founding. I believe it is worth celebrating. To be an American means more than just being a citizen of a particular country. Being an American means holding a set of core ideals: generosity of spirit, courage, humanity, and above all, fairness. This is the American character, the bedrock upon which our Constitution and laws are built.

These ideals, and thus we, have been betrayed.

Our betrayers sit in the White House and the Supreme Court. They are in corporate board rooms and behind editor’s desks. They have abandoned the principle of democracy. They have abdicated their responsibility to the weak and powerless, indulging instead a grotesque lust for wealth and influence. They are corrupt beyond measure, corrupt in mind and spirit, fundamentally and utterly corrupt, a corruption of corruption. They steal elections, they break treaties, they advocate torture and unprovoked war. They cheat, they steal, they rape and sodomize.

They are vindictive and brutal, taking revenge that exposes us all to danger. The good of the country is immaterial to them because they consider it unprofitable. They undermine the principles of government that have guided us through storms in the past, such as the separation of church and state. They have squandered our money and the money of our children and grandchildren in order to eliminate programs that protect the poor. They have put in place an educational system that is designed to fail as a pretext for crippling the schools. They have set up concentration camps called “detention centers” all over the world, and have instructed the keepers in the arts of violent coercion and sexual sadism.

They have taken political advantage of a horrific attack on our nation, using it as an excuse to curtail our civil rights. They demand secrecy for their actions, but have only to beckon and without our knowledge our reading habits and homes are open for their examination. They have taken the intelligence upon which our safety depends and contaminated it with ideological delusions and blatant lies. They prevaricate, they obfuscate, they misdirect and misspeak. They manipulate energy prices and editorials. They censor and silence, they imprison without charges or appeal, they punish criticism. They invade other nations for profit and lie to us about the reason, and when exposed they change the lie to another one, and another one after that. They bestride the globe with bloody hands, malign purpose and shifty eyes.

They are a catastrophe.

So celebrate our nation’s founding, and think about what it really means to be an American. Think hard and honestly.

Happy 4th of July. Register to vote.