News flash

OBAMA WALKS ON WATER, RAISES DEAD

WASHINGTON, DC – Thousands of worshipful but not very surprised onlookers today observed President-elect Barack Obama walk across the surface of the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington National Cemetery, parallel to the south side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. On the way, he was seen to cross two busy highways, the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Jefferson Davis Highway, by simply holding up his hand, at which gesture all traffic came to a grinding halt. Once at the Arlington Cemetery, he proceeded to raise several dozen newly buried veterans from their graves.

Ecstatic crowds lined the route, chanting his name with the addition of “Our Savior” and frantically grabbing at him to touch the hem of his garment. The Secret Service were powerless to do anything to keep them back, but decided it would be unwise and impolitic to try anyway.

Commentators have suggested that, impressive as these acts are, it will take far greater miracles for him to rescue the American economy from its continuing plunge into catastrophic collapse.

Gloom and doom

In my usually cheerful, upbeat mood, I Googled on “Gloom and doom” and found a blog (dating all the way back to 1999) actually called “Gloom and doom report” (author unidentified), which I immediately bookmarked. Some good stuff, but some a little fringey (with an anti-Zionist tone which frankly appeals to me, but we won’t get into that). Why was I Googling on this? In order to find reinforcement from other people and sources for my cheerful, upbeat mood, of course, which has recently received a downward shove at precisely the time when everyone else seems to be floating on clouds of euphoria.

I thought I had posted, back in early '07, soon after the hollow “victory” of the Dummy-crats winning weak “control” of Congress, a gloom-and-doom prediction that it wouldn’t amount to anything because the Dummies wouldn’t have the guts or balls to do anything about it. The closest to this that I can find in my archives is “Have a nice day” (2 June 07), which mentioned Joe Bageant’s prediction: “Even before the entire Congress recently begged the Mad Emperor for the privilege of standing in line to suck his cock by writing him a blank fucking check for his evil war, Bageant was warning that any appearance of the ‘liberals’ attaining victory because of pissed-off conservatives leaving the ranks was an illusion.” My skepticism and cynicism at that time were driven, of course, by everyone else’s elation at the Dummy-cratic “victory,” and Bageant seemed to be the only one besides me who took a jaundiced view of it; and we turned out, tragically, to be right, and Pelosi turned out to be not Speaker of the House but Spineless Jellyfish of the House.

Well, you can probably figure out where this is heading. Once more I’m in the position of raining on everyone else’s parade. After all the dancing in the streets and slapping each other on the back, comes the hard work of making good on all the rosy promises. And how many of them can be made good on? We all know that all politicians promise you the moon and give you a lump of moldy cheese, and we can only hope that Obama will give us slightly more than moldy cheese, even though it’s a safe bet he won’t be able (and perhaps never intended) to give us everything he promised. As I wrote on 12 September (“Who cares? It’s all lies.”): “I don’t think [Obama] will be able to make any fundamental difference [i.e., in terms of keeping his promises] … because the plutocratic cabal will keep him from doing so and will impede and frustrate his every move in that direction.” On "Doug's dynamic drivel," I was linked to a YouTube of that obnoxious loser Nader being interviewed on Fucks News on election night, in which he showed himself to be more of an asshole than usual by suggesting that Obama might turn out to be an “Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.” His choice of language was, of course, repulsive even for rhetoric, right up there with some of the McCain/Palin attacks, but the point was not just a cheap shot. He then went on to itemize some of the things in Obama’s history which he thinks support the allegation: “voted for the Wall Street bailout, supports expanding military budget that is desired by the military-industrial complex, doesn’t really have a tax reform thing for the ordinary fellow in this country, opposes single-payer full Medicare for all because the giant HMOs do, doesn’t have a living wage [policy], . . .” Well, that’s a pretty damning list, and if it’s true and accurate, it does cast a bit of a pall over the rainbow. Will he really try to deliver on his promises and be impeded and frustrated by the plutocratic cabal, or did he never really intend to deliver on them because he’s already in cahoots with them?

On the other hand, I will grant that even as President-elect, this early in the game, he does seem to have taken some promising steps in the right direction. So I’ll try to muster up a slightly more positive and hopeful attitude. But it’ll be hard work, and not entirely sincere. Even in a best-case scenario for Big O’s presidency, there remains the impending and rapidly approaching global eco-catastrophe (if the unstoppable global economic meltdown doesn’t get us first), and more and more pundits are claiming that any attempts to reverse it or even slow it down appreciably by any sorts of energy conservation measures will be too little too late. The handwriting is on the wall; and in case you didn’t know what handwriting that aphorism refers to, the source is Daniel 5, in which, during a drunken feast by King Belshazzar of Babylon, a disembodied hand (“The beast with five fingers”) appears and writes on the wall of the palace a message which is translated by Daniel: “You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting; your days are numbered.” Or more colloquially, your ass is buttermilk, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Time for a little levity

On the day when the fate of American civilization, if not of the whole world, hangs in the balance, I think we need a little humor. As usual, the path by which I came upon this little tidbit in Wikipedia is tortuous and unclear, but in the article on “Legends surrounding the papacy,” we learn that there was a legend that a woman, “Pope Joan,” had occupied that office in 855-858, that she became pregnant during her papacy, and that she gave birth after falling off a horse in public, whereupon she was stoned to death in the street by “the astonished crowd.” “As a consequence, popes throughout the medieval period were required to undergo a procedure wherein they sat on a special chair with a hole in the seat. A cardinal would have the task of putting his hand up the hole to check whether the pope had testicles.”

I wonder if Benny Sixteen (a.k.a. Ratman, a.k.a. “Eggs” Benedict) had to undergo this interesting examination. And who got picked to be the lucky cardinal? Was this chair like a toilet seat? Probably not; the hole was probably small enough so only his balls were accessible. If so, this eliminates the fascinating possibility of the cardinal getting his hand shat upon.

Welcome to the medieval Roman Church. I won’t even get into Pope John XII; look him up for yourselves. And you thought the modern Church was bad!