Article: Turning Back the Clocks One More Time

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Did you ever smell catfish bait? It 's like something died under the house and they mixed it into a doughball. It is that sweet and it competes real well with other smells you get down in the muck of a stagnant river.

Anyway, that 's the smell of politics down here in Texas right after our voters landslided onto a baited amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the better to keep other kinds of couples in their closets.

As a work of language the marriage amendment is very impressive evidence of the multiple illiteracies of our elected leadership. They obviously don 't understand the concept of liberty, since they have crafted a definition of marriage that prevents some adults from choosing marriage even when they would be hurting nobody by that choice. But they also don 't know much grammar either since the bare language of the thing seems to prevent the practice of marriage altogether (which is only bad grammar if it 's the opposite of what you meant to legislate.)

So if you thought Bush was the worst leadership that Texas could throw up to the world (bad pun intended) and you 've taken comfort that his Presidential years are constitutionally numbered then think again. We 've got a hundred more like him down here all fighting for power.

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I don 't mean to say that Texas people are way more hateful than your average state. There 's plenty of mean sh*t in this world to go around. But if Texans were way more hateful and you could prove it, most wouldn 't care too much. They 'd just say, well we 're not that much more hateful. And they 'd go right on thinking less of you.

Neither does it seem that we have a leadership that much worse than say California, but we do have leadership that cannot lead and will therefore use hateful means to hateful ends in the fattest, laziest pretense of problem solving, which that 's a dangerous thing if the surrounding crowd has no pride whatsoever in their capacity to love.

So, the clocks in Texas have all been turned back an hour or two and the darkness will be arriving a little earlier each day, purely in consideration of the extra hours needed by night riders to take advantage of this new season of hate.

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In fact, eight members of the Klan got so excited about the smell of politics that last Saturday they drove half a day to Austin to proclaim their love for the chance to practice real Christian morality in the aftermath of a landslide. I don 't know how much gas they used along the way, or how much they thought about the meaning of those gas prices, but like I said, catfish bait politics does really well in a muck that 's already stinkin.

So if you woke up early Tuesday and heard Amy Goodman tell you about the phosphorus bombs that burned the people of Falluja to death, and you stayed up late Tuesday night to find out that among freedom loving people, gay adults need to be told what not to do, then you could hardly go to bed thinking anything but revolution, because if you didn 't wake up pushing for some kind of revolution Wednesday morning, there is no question that you would just be begging to be pushed around one more time.