Wood That Won’t Float

Thirty years after the fact, the Los Angels Sheriff’s Department is reopening its investigation of Oscar nominee Natalie Wood’s death.  After the Black Dahlia murder, her enigmatic drowning off Catalina Island endures as the Southland’s most renowned mystery.   House Republicans, too, remain fixated both on 1981 and dead actors in their sisyphean struggle to recreate the Reagan era.   One can easily overlook, they would aver, the Gipper’s alchemizing our great nation from the world’s largest creditor into her largest debtor by recalling his Ag Secretary John Block’s historic effort to re-categorize ketchup as a vegetable.  As if to channel the Alzheimer-in-Chief, Hill Tea Partiers recently introduced legislation to count pizza and Tater Tots as vegetables in school lunches.  According to an appropriations committee spokesperson, the new rules would not only “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations [but also] provide greater flexibility for local school districts to repay the $5.6 million that Conagra and other frozen food makers spent lobbying us.”

 

When Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt famously quipped about a sub-committee comprising “a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple,” it failed only by a fraction to eclipse Nixon and Ford Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s infamous apothegm: “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.”  Since then, society’s attitudes about race and gender (everyone still hates Jews) have thankfully shifted, albeit unequally.  While we no longer a priori rule out a gynic presidency (recall: Hillary’s run), revelation that Sarah Palin porked black basketball player Glen Rice killed her political viability more abruptly than a second-trimester abortion.  Yet for those who condemn Herman Cain for his sexual predations, the fact that both his accusers are white has become distinctly irrelevant.   Now that’s what I call progress.

Rebuttal Redux

While watching the Republicans turn on each other makes for great theater (imagine watching the school bully feverishly claw at his eczema), one can only conclude that we are inexorably doomed.  True, the British Empire (what’s left of it) has remained extant if not vibrant in the wake of the greatest hegemonic ablation in human history; nonetheless, I wouldn’t bet on lightning striking twice.  And I’m not sure if the impending collapse of property values in China (some estimates put the value of toxic real estate loans at 10% of GDP) will accrue to our benefit or demise. The same can be said of the European debt crisis.  It is only a matter of months, now, until the imposition of shari’a law — notably the vitiation of all interest-bearing instruments — will be proffered as the Continent’s only viable path to fiscal recovery.

I don’t feel, therefore, I could do any more damage to the commonweal by offering to revise the churlish and scripted dialog emanating from the recent debates.  When Mitt Romney was chastised by Gov. Perry for employing illegal immigrants to mow his lawn, he fumbled and bumbled a lame retort.  What he should have said is: “Look, Rick, 7% of Texans are here illegally.  Nearly 70% of those are on welfare.  Texas subsidizes higher education for illegals by lowering fees and doling out millions in financial aid.  All this is a magnet, a magnet pulling thousands and thousands of Mexicans across our border.  What the fuck, Rick, you might as well drive a bus down to Juarez and bring them over yourself.”

Panic on the Streets of London…

…Panic on the Streets of Birmingham; I wonder to myself, could life ever be sane again? Neither The Smiths nor British authorities, at least those not yet felled by the Murdoch wiretapping scandal, managed to hang the DJ, though investigations into the Tweets, Facebook Postings and Blackberry Messages which fomented and directed three nights of civil unrest are assuredly under way. It is without dispute that rioting escalated after the shooting death of a crack dealer by police; it’s no longer a mystery, then, that crackheads get a bit tetchy when their supply gets kinked.  The coppers, moreover, claimed they were initially fired upon by the victim, though forensics, predictably, have since shown the gun in question was never discharged.  Nonetheless, it is social media taking the preponderance of blame for the depth and scope of the insurrection. Personally, I remain ambivalent about the locus of culpability; it was (presumably) sentient beings that burned double decker buses and looted jewelry stores. On the other hand, my neighbor , according to foursquare, has just replaced me as mayor of my wife’s vagina.