El Estado de la Unión 07
El Estado de la Unión 07
The Cowboy’s guns are no longer smoking. He appears to be out of bullets; his sneer turned to a grimace; his enemies breathing down his neck at all times. Footsteps in the hallway at nighttime; a dictator and his generals suddenly and for the first time leery of the noose. Things have changed. Things have changed.
Talking Heads…that’s what I like to call the guys and gals that get all dressed up to talk about stuff. Political Pundits is what they might call themselves—or experts even. Just as the State of the Union address was getting started with all the grandiose entrances of the Joint Chiefs and the Supreme Court the politicos were saying that this year’s speech is going to be greatly different than the last six—this time the president is decidedly not sitting at the cool kid table.
One guy went as far as to say that W’s position is weaker for this address than Clinton was for the one he gave during which he was being impeached. At long last, some evidence that a president should be under more fire for starting a war based on lies and deception rather than getting some head in the oval office. But I digress…
In previous years, last I think, W was all about bashing me over the head with and shoving down my throat as much “faith based organizations need federal funding.” This year, he barely mustered a “god bless America” at the end. This was a speech lacking any of the fire and brimstone sensibility of the previous years. No more smug, self-assuredness. This president has shown me how much T-U-F-F-E-R he is than everyone else, including the Congress, every day of the week—up until about two hours ago.
By my count there were thirty (30) standing ovations this year. From the time Pelosi introduced the president till he walked off the podium. Although this year, the majority Dem’s made it more apparent, regardless of how the cameras tried to crop the shot, that most of those standing O’s were not extended throughout the house. I also counted about seven (7) or eight (8) “I asks” from W. “’I asks?” you say.
Well, in the past, W wouldn’t “ask” for a damn thing. He would say “you must” or “we must” or “Congress must” because up until two hours ago, there wasn’t anyone standing up to him. Even Cheney was falling asleep behind him. (And I think it was funny that during the W’s spiel on reducing our dependence on gasoline as a fuel source, Cheney wore a scowl, and refused to join the standing ovation that followed the W’s declaration of increased support of alternative fuel sources. Hilarious.)
Lieberman, what a douche bag. And for that matter, Cheney laughed in his chair when the W suggested a twenty (20) percent (%) reduction in gasoline use within the next ten (10) years.
“Twenty percent less gas? That’ll never happen—I got one word for you: it starts with an H and ends with ALIBURTON! I’m gonna go eat some souls…” Cheney wears his heart, his cold, black, soulless heart on his expression.
This year, less by a few days than one year later, I realize now how much of a disconnect there is between how I was during the last State o’the Union and now. Although I look at how last years speech affected me, and I can see the seeds had already begun to germinate. I haven’t become a person who doesn’t care about politics, there is simply no more pieces of my heart left to break on the subject. I have lost the faith.
During the Dem’s rebuttal, Sen. Webb said a quote from one of the Andrew’s, Jackson or Johnson, I forget which, but the point was that we should measure the greatness of our nation not by the apex, but by the base of our society. There is a similar saying in all sports: “you’re only as strong as your weakest player.” For us, after electing a president to satiate our own need to hate each other, one of our most fabled and unique cities was smashed by a storm and left to fend for itself. I am one of many who think that New Orleans was more indicative of how ill-equipped we are as a nation to provide the most basic services to our own people. Hey, Detroit has been under water for decades; many great cities, once great cities, were hit by a title wave of poverty and have been bailing out the dingy with a little bucket ever since. Finally there was no more room for metaphors, and what was necessary to make us see what we were doing to each other came in the form a hurricane and storm surge. The real tragedy about Katrina wasn’t that a fucking storm destroyed a city, it was that a city filled with citizens of the “greatest nation in the world” was so unimportant to us all it had to be washed out of existence for us to realize how badly off the people who lived there were.
To sum up: maybe in the next few years, some one will bring Humanity to the United States. We already have democracy…which is probably why W isn’t concerned with us at all.
Peace.
The Cowboy’s guns are no longer smoking. He appears to be out of bullets; his sneer turned to a grimace; his enemies breathing down his neck at all times. Footsteps in the hallway at nighttime; a dictator and his generals suddenly and for the first time leery of the noose. Things have changed. Things have changed.
Talking Heads…that’s what I like to call the guys and gals that get all dressed up to talk about stuff. Political Pundits is what they might call themselves—or experts even. Just as the State of the Union address was getting started with all the grandiose entrances of the Joint Chiefs and the Supreme Court the politicos were saying that this year’s speech is going to be greatly different than the last six—this time the president is decidedly not sitting at the cool kid table.
One guy went as far as to say that W’s position is weaker for this address than Clinton was for the one he gave during which he was being impeached. At long last, some evidence that a president should be under more fire for starting a war based on lies and deception rather than getting some head in the oval office. But I digress…
In previous years, last I think, W was all about bashing me over the head with and shoving down my throat as much “faith based organizations need federal funding.” This year, he barely mustered a “god bless America” at the end. This was a speech lacking any of the fire and brimstone sensibility of the previous years. No more smug, self-assuredness. This president has shown me how much T-U-F-F-E-R he is than everyone else, including the Congress, every day of the week—up until about two hours ago.
By my count there were thirty (30) standing ovations this year. From the time Pelosi introduced the president till he walked off the podium. Although this year, the majority Dem’s made it more apparent, regardless of how the cameras tried to crop the shot, that most of those standing O’s were not extended throughout the house. I also counted about seven (7) or eight (8) “I asks” from W. “’I asks?” you say.
Well, in the past, W wouldn’t “ask” for a damn thing. He would say “you must” or “we must” or “Congress must” because up until two hours ago, there wasn’t anyone standing up to him. Even Cheney was falling asleep behind him. (And I think it was funny that during the W’s spiel on reducing our dependence on gasoline as a fuel source, Cheney wore a scowl, and refused to join the standing ovation that followed the W’s declaration of increased support of alternative fuel sources. Hilarious.)
Lieberman, what a douche bag. And for that matter, Cheney laughed in his chair when the W suggested a twenty (20) percent (%) reduction in gasoline use within the next ten (10) years.
“Twenty percent less gas? That’ll never happen—I got one word for you: it starts with an H and ends with ALIBURTON! I’m gonna go eat some souls…” Cheney wears his heart, his cold, black, soulless heart on his expression.
This year, less by a few days than one year later, I realize now how much of a disconnect there is between how I was during the last State o’the Union and now. Although I look at how last years speech affected me, and I can see the seeds had already begun to germinate. I haven’t become a person who doesn’t care about politics, there is simply no more pieces of my heart left to break on the subject. I have lost the faith.
During the Dem’s rebuttal, Sen. Webb said a quote from one of the Andrew’s, Jackson or Johnson, I forget which, but the point was that we should measure the greatness of our nation not by the apex, but by the base of our society. There is a similar saying in all sports: “you’re only as strong as your weakest player.” For us, after electing a president to satiate our own need to hate each other, one of our most fabled and unique cities was smashed by a storm and left to fend for itself. I am one of many who think that New Orleans was more indicative of how ill-equipped we are as a nation to provide the most basic services to our own people. Hey, Detroit has been under water for decades; many great cities, once great cities, were hit by a title wave of poverty and have been bailing out the dingy with a little bucket ever since. Finally there was no more room for metaphors, and what was necessary to make us see what we were doing to each other came in the form a hurricane and storm surge. The real tragedy about Katrina wasn’t that a fucking storm destroyed a city, it was that a city filled with citizens of the “greatest nation in the world” was so unimportant to us all it had to be washed out of existence for us to realize how badly off the people who lived there were.
To sum up: maybe in the next few years, some one will bring Humanity to the United States. We already have democracy…which is probably why W isn’t concerned with us at all.
Peace.
posted by texas_wolverine at 9:20 PM
1 Comments:
Nice to see you back out here. Good stuff...
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