State of the Nation

Boys, other readers,

I have been in the Heartland of this country for the last week or so, and I have had occasion to notice many things happening in our fine country. I want to talk about some concerns I have about your tone on this blog.

First things first: there does not seem to be any sense that we live in the finest country in the world. There are articles about unwinnable wars, veterans being charged for hurting their equipment during war, corporations acting like anti-democratic regimes hell-bent on the destruction of soul in the blind pursuit of abstract dollar amounts and the fallacy of any kind of first amendment rights while apparent jackals run the government and monkeys campaign to lead it. In the midst of all this there are also articles about squirrelly Elvis impersonators, a birthday (a new year welcomed in smut no less), some baseball (but in such a cynical way! Apple pie my friends, is the taste we have for baseball), more baseball (again, quite cynical) and threats of calls to immigration made against Evanston-born citizens.

What about Great America?

Not the enjoyable amusement park just north of Chicago along I-94, peddling its wares to those speeding automobiles heading home after a long day in the office some 30 miles southeast. I'm talking about the good things happening in America. The fact that so many of our fellow citizens are able to find multiple jobs. Just think of an American economy so strong that many people can find two, three and in some cases, four (!) jobs!

I'm talking about an America able to lead the entertainment industry around the globe so that other countries take their lead from our collective imagination. An industry that has been so powerful as to teach our journalists even, how to do their jobs! Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fine films like Norbert, Fantastic Four 2, and Spiderman 3, and it's a good thing too! There's a lot of stuff happening to other people that we need to take our minds off of. What minds! We have such an interesting and exciting educational system that is mathematically proving to make better and better students!

Let's not even talk about television! And the great foresight of our music industry!

We need more of the good news stories that otherwise might disappear off the peripheries of our consciousness. Like that story about the cat that predicts death and how he got an award. That was nice.

Here's a start. This is an article entitled, "At Last! Good News from Iraq", it's all about how troops are not dying in Iraq so often as they did in other wars from things like car crashes or disease, like dysentery. Like I know you will, when you read it, I feel a lump of happiness in my throat, a great rejoicing that our troops are so much better protected by God than those Islamic Fascists, or whatever they're called this week, who always seem to blow up in their cars or near the cars, as well, a lot of them seem to die from diseases and causes that we don't have to worry about so much over here because of our amazing access to health care.

Please try to find more of these happy stories. You can try the New York Post, it's run by an Australian, and Australians are kind of like Americans on steroids.

It's like that FOX guy said about anti-war activists when we took Baghdad back for freedom a few years back (and quoted in something Mr. McClure linked, or maybe it was Mr. Smiffy,) about anti-war protesters, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." The reason he said they were sickening was not because he felt they shouldn't be allowed to say what they want, as long as they have a permit and nobody else is offended and they're not on private or public property and they have police protection so that if somebody doesn't like what they are saying they won't cause those other people to react violently and get in trouble, he said they were sickening because they make people worry about what's right and wrong when they can't control anything anyway. This is a democracy, not some free-for-all. People like him know the best way to have a democracy is to have everybody agree and support policy that protects our freedom and our way of life, which is freedom! It's like they say, if you don't support our president and his president, the vice president ("vice" is like the German uber but without any umlauts), you don't support our troops. I am telling you, there will be blowback against the way you think now. When people realize that people who start arguments are doing it because they want everybody to lose, they (the good people of our democracy) will not be happy.

I fear this is true. It will only take one crack of the whip, and they know that. And they are probably banking on it. They always end up being They.

best wishes,

fellow blog contributor,

and etc....