The Unfortunate Fall
As you must remember, we’ve got an extra week before we fall ahead. Although we gain an hour of sleep, we have to start wearing miner helmets to work in the morning. The Bushleaguers say the time change was to save energy, but I think the red twizzler lobby is big. I bet they got daylight savings time extended to the week after Halloween so that the kids would have an extra hour to trick or treat. The dental lobby must also have been in on the deal.
The other morning, as we were reading the paper, my dear Indian girlfriend announced, as if I’d asked, that she had decided what she was going to be for Halloween. I was trying to make sense of the word jumble that is now a Maureen Dowd column and thought for a minute my galpal was talking about reincarnation. I asked, “What are you coming back as?”
She seemed irked that I had not been thinking along with her. “No, for Halloween. I’ve decided I’m going to be an Unconflicted White Man.” The straight was understood. And this year she gets an extra hour for it. Not that they need it.
In the midst of wartime, the UWM lives in complete peace with himself. Donald Rumsfeld demurs that he is ‘out of the loop’ on the war because he is starting an institute to restore civility to civic participation. Dick Cheney chugs along as head of the fourth branch of government, the Execulative. In the Vanity Fair issue, which finally chronicles the media goring of Al Gore, the gung-ho war ho Christopher Hitchens, blithely describes his spa makeover.
Some nights I lie awake in bed, jangled awake from a twizzler sugar high, and think, “They must have some remorse for what they’ve done.” It’s all pure projection on my part.
In China, when officials err, they have the decency to kill themselves. In the US, they go on victory lap, book tours. The rollout for Alan Greenspan’s preemptive saveface-book could be a model for a well-planned and brilliantly executed exit strategy. The retired head of the Federal Reserve was around like a bad penny – Jim Lehrer, Jon Stewart, Charlie Rose. The big party spoiler was Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine, about as popular in the economic discourse as an unclaimed backpack on a bus. If I Did It v. You Know You Did It.
The If-I-Didiot-in-Chief won’t move off Moveon.org. Somehow the Petraeus/Betray-us [and he did] ad with a really good/bad pun has set off the Grandmaster of UWM. Because absolutely everything else is in order in his world, the Nicknamer-in-Chief has to fixate on this ad.
Admittedly it is “Sticks and Stones Week” here in Manhattan. Whenever the U.N. Security Council meets in mid-town, the city becomes a parking lot. And it’s as if the parking lot is used as a playground for recess by a local elementary school. In addition to the screeching good fun of “Red Rover, Red Rover let Karl Come Over, He Can’t, He’s Spending Time with the Family” [which is secret code for “going to advise the Giuliani campaign” – hey, they didn’t get rid of all the gay translators], there is plenty of good old fashioned name calling.
‘Evil one’, ‘nut job’ ‘fruitbat’ and more epithets echo throughout the canyons. Good thing the Red Sox aren’t in town. Good thing what’s his name isn’t on the radio anymore. Oh yeah. Don Anus.
September 28, 2007 @ 8:47 am
Senator Craig is in court now, apparently to sue to have his political virginity restored. Yep, bad judgment got him into this, and clearly, it’s still going down hill.