“The American Dream has died,” stated Madam Jane this morning over coffee. “This country is doomed to never again amount to more what it is now — a cheap source of rent-a-cop armies for corporations and an economic blood donor to keep the personhood of Big Business alive and well.” But surely it can’t be as bad as all that. Can it? “Oh yeah it can,” replied Madam Jane — who claims that her crystal ball never lies.
“As long as corporations continue to receive all the same rights as citizens but are required to pay almost no taxes http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110325/ts_yblog_thelookout/g-e-paid-no-taxes-on-5-1-billion-in-profits, I predict that these vampire-like corporatists will continue to feed off of America’s body like the evil pin worms that they are until our country dies and becomes just one more pale smelly national corpse being stored in their crypt.” Good grief, MJ! This time you are going too far! Evil pin worms? Really? And besides, where is your proof?
“I, like Fox News, don’t need no stinking proof,” responded Madam J. “It is what it is. Either America grows a pair now or starts preparing to meet its final doom. Madam Jane has spoken.” Yikes!
“But American CAN change!” I cried out like some terrified and repentant modern-day Unca Scrooge who had just been confronted with the ghost of Bob Marley. Yet despite all of my entreaties, Madam Jane just shrugged.
“The future never lies,” intoned Madam Jane, “because it is based on the past — and on the present. Just lookie here. Right now you’ve got America’s heroic soldiers fighting rent-a-cop wars for Exxon and BP in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. And you got your courts tied up in knots while trying to bend over far enough to get properly screwed by Monsanto, Wells Fargo, Big Pharma, Rupert Murdoch and AT&T. And you’ve got your Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury happily opening their veins up to Wall Street. And you’ve got evil corporatists in charge of most of your state governments and voting machines. Plus you’ve got your current President trying to act like he was the Bush family’s red-headed step child….”
Enough of all this gloom and doom, Madam Jane! “Can’t you just predict something happy for a change — like who’s gonna be in the World Series next year or who’s going to win a million dollars on Survivor?” Or who will finally stand up to the corporations who now own America and actually get America’s oligarchs to stop shoveling us all this “Personhood” crap? Or perhaps you could predict when Americans will actually finally start to grow a pair?
“Sorry. No can do. Not in the cards. I see what I see.” Humph. If that’s all you see, Madam Jane, then perhaps it’s time to go buy yourself a new pair of glasses. This is not the way that the Great American Experiment is supposed to end!
PS: I keep telling my family that I’m not gonna ever write any more political stuff ever again because it has become such a thankless task. Nobody wants to hear me — or Madam Jane either — sounding like Cassandra. “I need to just stick to travel writing,” I keep telling them. “Nobody wants to read all this negative stuff.” But then America’s slimy corporatists do something else intolerable once again — such as pay absolutely NO taxes at all on billions of dollars in profits on the exact same day that I’m putting my own lowly $750 IRS check in the mail — and I get all enraged once again. And as for travel? Who can afford to do that any more.
Ah but I still have a whole bunch of wonderful travel memories stored up.
PPS: Please don’t tell M.J. this, but I also just consulted another fortune teller — a gypsy palmist in Oakland. And she told me that I needed to get more organized and to meditate more. So I started to set my timer for 15 minutes a day in order to organize my apartment for 15 whole minutes every day. So far so good.
Then I started meditating — first I meditated on the past, then on the present and then on the future. But all I could remember about my childhood were those summers at Girl Scout camp and that time that my parents bought a green 1946 Studebaker Commander from Uncle Rudy and we had to fly back to New York to pick it up.
This was in 1951.
Our plane was old and propeller-driven, probably left over from World War II, and took us on its milk run through Denver, Chicago, Amarillo, Louisville and Pittsburgh before finally landing in New York. The flight took over 24 hours, most of that time spent throwing up. I will never forget Amarillo because of some horrible scrambled eggs served at the airport diner.
Then we all drove back to California — my mom, my dad, my sister and I, plus my grandfather who had been living with Uncle Rudy. And Grandfather Eugene PINCHED me every time that I’d squirm. And it hurt! But my parents didn’t believe me over him.
No one messed with Grandfather Eugene. Heck, we didn’t even dare call him Grandpa. He was raised in the Oklahoma Territory back in the day and worked as a migrant farm-worker when he was younger, picking apples in Oregon and peaches in Banning, California.
My dad was born in Roswell, New Mexico in 1911, on the family’s way out to California, one of six boys. Grandfather Eugene had stopped there to help harvest grain — and my Uncle Jim got his leg cut off in a threshing machine accident that year. Uncle Jim was only three years old. It devastated my grandfather — but not Jim. He later grew up to become a big California real estate tycoon.
Meanwhile, my grandmother Alta kept trying for a girl — and finally gave up and just dressed her youngest, Uncle Ray, in girl’s clothing until he was six. And Uncle Ray grew up to become aide-de-camp to General Vandenberg during WWII, lost all his hair to malaria in the Pacific and was gay. Uncle Ray later claimed that he became gay because Uncle Gene used to take him out behind the barn when they were kids — and not because of General Vandenberg. Uncle Ray went on to be aide-de-camp to Conrad Hilton but quit in a huff when Hilton alleged kept making him fly in Canadian hottie girls for his (Hilton’s) pleasure.
And to continue the family saga, Uncle Gene went on to overcome his migrant farm-worker roots, develop a phony British accent and become an English professor at Pomona. Family legend also has it that his first wife died mysteriously in a house fire and that he kept his rich second wife locked in a closet. But you can’t prove it by me.
PPPS: The palmist also indicated that I would live a very long life (she said this, however, a week before Fukushima started melting down) and that I was not to be afraid of death.
That statement about death also got me to thinking that perhaps the reason that so many religions are so fond of reincarnation — or of being raised back up from the dead when the final trumpet blows — is because this idea of rebirth might make it, psychologically speaking, a hecka lot easier to die.
It might be easier to kick the bucket if you knew that the condition of being dead was only temporary, right? That you will be only passing through the Valley of Death for a few minutes while riding on that Train to Glory. Works for me.
But if I were ever to get reincarnated, I’d like to come back as a Native American — living in the woods and communing with Nature (but also being able to withstand being cold. I HATE having cold feet.)
PPPPS: Do you think that if enough palmists look at the hands of enough young children (and can actually truly see into the future as well), will they be able to see whether or not the human race will be able to survive all that radiation from Fukushima, combined with the nasty effects of global warming, endless war, pesticide-infested GM crops, diet sodas and all other evil deeds done over the years by greedy corporatists (who, perhaps, are reincarnations of Benito Mussolini).
Or will said palmists instead see a new and better world where nature is protected, Wall Street is shut down, we the people run Washington, art and education are the USA’s top gross national products and war is obsolete?
I’m almost afraid to ask Madam Jane what she would say about that!
The Tattlesnake – CPAC Proof GOP is Still Doomed Edition
CPAC’s Corporate Mythmakers and True Believers Headed for a Hard Fall
“Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they’ve been scammed. They call it the ‘True Believer Syndrome.’”
– Matt Taibbi, “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle,” Rolling Stone, Feb. 21, 2010.
You know you’re in trouble when your keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the current Dancing Bear of the Fox Evening Zoo and promulgator of preposterous pompous carnival-clown revisionism of everything from the political thinking of progressive Tom Paine to the nature of Marxism. (Well, at least he left the cry-eye Vick’s VapoRub in the dressing room for this event.) Beck, like the rest of the Fox News team, seems to delight in unapologetically getting it wrong, time after time, and he knows his fans never read such authors as Paine or Karl Marx so, with skillful editing, ventriloquist Glenn can plant whatever Bizarro World ideas he desires in the mouths of the departed and defenseless. The most dedicated inhabitants of TV’s Beckistan no doubt reject the proof of their own eyes and ears when confronted with any reality that veers from the Ringmaster’s teachings, as any mind-locked True Believer does. It’s a matter of faith — in a Republican Jesus, or Roger Ailes’ political ads disguised as news, or Frank Luntz’s fright-laden euphemisms, or a former beauty queen turned half-term governor from Alaska. It’s amazing that they wave the flag of freedom so strenuously – they apparently only want the freedom to follow a leader, and down the narrowest of ideological paths, at that.
Speaking of Gov. Mrs. Palin, she was not in appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference; not only could the organizers not meet her hefty price for speechifying, but she perhaps discerned, with the dumb canniness sometimes given to the vapid, that she wouldn’t be welcome in a crowd that voted Mitt Romney first in their last three presidential straw polls.
And then there’s the bright-eyed Romney himself; like most of his party, the former Massachusetts governor stopped making any consistent and coherent sense long ago; his speeches are now grab-bags of memorized GOP Talking Points and anti-Obama crowd-pleasers, but he has mostly refrained from the cringe-inducing personal vignettes such as tying incontinent pets to the roof of the family ride for a jaunt on the open highway or his Milquetoast macho-man exploits of gunning down small rodents with a hunting rifle. The things most people would be embarrassed to admit, Mitt banters about airily with a male model’s manly grin, which I guess proves he is a Republican to his core.
And speaking of core Republicans, we have Mr. Cheney, Richard the Lyin’-Hearted, a man with no intelligence or military experience (an appointment as Secretary of Defense does not make one an expert on interrogation or confinement), who openly boasts that his unconstitutional torture program worked, believes he competently handled his role as White House counter-terrorism chief prior to 9/11, and has a long, clanking string of wrongheaded predictions following him like a trail of empty cans tied to a cat’s tail. Cheney is arguably the most disliked politician in America, but in the upside-down world of CPAC, he is a national champion and was greeted with the garlands of approbation by the assembled worshippers in Washington that he once erroneously said would be thrown at our troops in Iraq. Perhaps as a sign of how far out in the ozone the gathered Republicans and their neoconservative cohorts orbit, many lustily cheered a Cheney run for president in 2012; Bush’s superordinate vice president had enough sense to tease and then quickly squelch that notion and spare himself the humiliation of a 50-state landslide victory for President Obama.
Cheney, on cue, availed himself of the opportunity to produce another of his wacky spells of side-splitting clairvoyance – the Republicans would be resurgent in 2010 and Obama would be a one-term president. With his shot-in-the-face record of the exact opposite happening, you’d think he’d bury his cloudy crystal ball and stop making an ass of himself in this way but, then, you don’t know Dick – he seems to thrive on being wrong and then denying it. Regardless of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom, three races where the Republican won against miserable Dem candidates does not make a trend and, as the overworked Cocktail Party Punditocracy cliché goes, “in politics, a month is like a year.” With Cheney’s smug regurgitation of this trite BCW on the glowing prospects for Republicans this year, it’s bankable that it won’t be quite as bad a year for the Democrats as the GOP would like it to be. And defeating Obama in 2012? Perhaps Dick should have a candidate in mind first to complete that task – none of the current GOP front-runners would come anywhere near to pushing Obama out of the presidency except Ron Paul, and Cheney and the GOP elite loathe him.
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