Rant!

"Just stop panicking!"

"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Arthur. "This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking."

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Down in beautiful Moulton, Texas we have an event twice a year called the "City-Wide Garage Sale" where everybody, (Lutherans and Catholic) put out their stuff for sale while everybody goes from place to place buying other people's stuff. Then they sell each other's stuff to one another beginning the next time, and so on. Over the span of time, a person is liable to wind up buying their own stuff back; hopefully, for a deal.

This phenomena strikes me as a sort of artificial economy, but some money had to have entered the circle at some point to replace the stuff that doesn't get recirculated because the individual who bought it liked it enough to keep it. I have kept my bottles, Baldwin organ, Hillbilly lamps (made from Wild Turkey Decanters) and the duck-taped, green Naugahyde ottoman. But where does the money come from in the village of Moulton?

Well, there's the farm economy that is heavily ag subsidized. Plus social security disability and retirement. The most eligible bachelors are the ones with a SSA and a VA disability check - paging Mr.Wonderful!. If you count welfare and the sweet largess of state, county and city jobs, including school districts, it becomes clear the place is a welfare queen's holiday.

You see, Mouton doesn't make anything. Neither does Lavaca county, except for Shiner beer and metal wastepaper baskets. An ideal combination: drinking heavily with the perfect receptacle for discarding your useless resume. That's why the kids don't hang around. The average age in Moulton is 48 years old.

The ironic thing about this situation is how down-right ungrateful the citizens of such an idyllic place are for all that free money that allows for the continuation of the city-wide garage sale tradition. The notion that people in the "real America" (the one that Sarah Palin waxes so poetically over) vote to punish and over-throw the very system that keeps things a-float has been written about by social and political scientists for a number of years now. There was a influential book written about how kooky this apparent cognitive dissonance is called "What's the Matter With Kansas." The author Thomas Franks observed...

"Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat- packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."


In order to keep the rubes in a froth, the Republicans created a golem. A soulless monster bent on mayhem. Instead of fleeing the torch-bearing peasants, he leads them. The monster has run amok for so long it no longer knows its purpose and leaves his masters behind. Happening upon an innocent child what does the monster do?

I fear the child of Obama's political dreams is dead. Strangled to death.