5
5
4
An angry Rhesus monkey is apt to defecate in its hands and throw its feces at you. I think this accurately sums up the debating skills of the current crop of Republican cartoons currently vying for The Top Job. All except Rick Perry of course. He's taken the deer-caught-in-the headlights stylings of George W. Bush to a whole new level by simply soiling himself on national television. But he's not as smart as Mitt Romney et al, because he doesn't know what to do with his ammunition once he's made it.
After watching the Republican Gong Show it's obvious to anyone smarter than a goldfish that any one of these "leaders" of the Republican Party, if elected, will take this country straight to hell at roughly the speed of sound. The Democrats are the obviously prudent choice. Obama proposes proceeding down the road to perdition at the stately rate of only 55 miles an hour. Thank God our country has a two-party system. We have the freedom to choose how fast we want to die.
Seemingly switching topics for a moment ... did you know massive numbers of migrating lemmings do not commit mass suicide by flinging themselves off cliffs to drown in the sea below?
That particular fake fact was implanted in my brain because I grew up watching Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on a black-and-white Zenith television set. The 1958 Disney documentary, White Wilderness, staged the footage of lemmings jumping to their death during faked scenes of mass migration. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown over 500 miles from Hudson Bay to Calgary where they did not jump from the precipice, but were launched off the cliff using a specially built turntable. Years and years later a couple of video games reinforced the notion that lemmings were prone to snuffing themselves but ...
Lemmings do not commit mass suicide.
We do.
We're in the process of doing it right now. And we're more ambitious than the misunderstood arctic rodents. We're taking as much of the planet as we can ... with us.
We're all marching steadily up to the edge of the cliff, surrounded by friends, family, and everybody else trapped in this insane culture. We're at the point now where we can see where we're going, and what's going to happen once we get there.
We're going to jump.
All of us.
Whether we want to or not ... We're going to jump.
It's the classic nightmare. We're going to our doom but we can't seem to stop putting one foot in front of the other. Some of us are telling the others that we shouldn't keep walking up to the cliff. And some of us agree that we should stop ... but we just keep walking in the same direction.
Every day ... all day ... some yahoo like Rush Limbaugh pulls out a bullhorn and tells us to walk faster. This is the direction we're supposed to be heading and we've got to pick up the pace to get there even quicker. Anyone who says otherwise is a dirty rotten liberal jihadist terrorist. And then a conciliatory voice from the liberal community advises us that we should possibly consider slowing down. Many of us agree. And the endless argument about speeding up or slowing down ripples through the crowd walking relentlessly towards the cliff.
As we march toward oblivion we can see, if we choose to look, the destruction we've caused everywhere we've been. Wherever we've walked, the fertile land has become a desert. With every step we can see it's getting worse.
A tour of Seattle's Museum of History and Industry begins with a small placard on a wall stating the Native People who greeted the American settlers had lived in the region for ... "thousands of years." To be more precise, they had been living there since the end of the last glacial period over 10,000 years ago.
1 | 2
