What A Joke

Wanna know what I think? I think that Sarah Palin is a joke. There, I said it. I think that she has lied directly to the American people. And all I hear is that she's a maverick. ("I do not think that means what you think it means.") She has taken federal money without reservation or conscience. She has lobbied for those dollars. I think it's fitting that she supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" because when it comes to Sarah Palin, I think there's no there there.

I think that all sorts of contortions are being done to justify voting for a ticket that promises to run this country further into the ground. If nothing else, Republicans are supposed to be about the money. Meanwhile these Republican clowns - following the Bush Doctrine! - have depleted our economy to the point where financial pillars that have stood for over a century are crumbling into the gutters of Wall Street on a daily basis.

I don't criticize Sarah Palin because she has five kids or chose to have a child with Down's Syndrome. I criticize her because she claims to have gone places she didn't go to manufacture experience and knowledge she doesn't have. And so what if she can see Russia from her house?! My buddy can see Dodger Stadium from his house, that don't make him no center fielder.

I did not vote for Alan Keyes. Why? Because, though he is Black, I can think of few people in this country I find more politically and personally reprehensible. I support Barack Obama because he is a candidate I believe in. And I resent the insinuation that he simply won the Democractic nomination because of sexism. Did sexism have its primary ahead of schedule? And while I'm on Obama and all the hell he's caught re: sexism... What did he actually do or say that was sexist? Yes, the media may have been out of line on various occasions. But I keep asking what Barack actually did and I get these vague stares and mumbling, meandering responses.

But I digress. The point is that Sarah Palin is the poster child for White privilege. (Tim Wise broke this down like an organic compound. Check out that article: http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege) I wish that there were a Shaqualanda Obama sitting there pregnant with a thug boyfriend. Would our nation be so respectful of a family's privacy then? Oh... give me a break.

You know what I say to a nation that would vote for McCain/Palin? Well, then you deserve them. Go on. Cut off your nose to spite your uterus. I know doctors. Should a family member ever be in trouble, I'm sure I'll be able to work out a quiet little deal. But what of all those who won't have those relationships. How dare Sarah Palin bemoan her right to a private family decision as she poises herself to rob every American of that same right.

Lipstick? No, that's not the difference. The difference between Sarah Palin and a pitbull is that there is no reason that the pitbull should know better than to kill people whether with elective war, wire hangers or the poverty that will sweep this nation if unregulated companies are allowed to continue their unconscionable money-grab that is subsidized by government bail-outs. Go on. Vote for McCain/Palin. "Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb, bomb, Iran." And let Blackwater reap the rewards. Way to support the troops! What are people thinking?!

Sarah Palin is a joke. They say that comedy is just tragedy plus time. But this time around it will be comedy plus time that equals tragedy. What a joke. That's what I think.

Five Years Later

It was an unremarkable morning. I woke up early as I often do. I had a script to read before heading off to a meeting. I laid out on the couch in the quiet of the morning. I probably would have had to stop to think of the date if you would have asked me at that moment. But today, five years later, I am very clear about it. It was September 11, 2001.

The phone rang. It was my little sister. "Mommy called me and said that planes flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center." "What?," I said incredulously. "Let me call you right back."

"The Pentagon and the World Trade Center ain't nowhere near each other," I thought. "That doesn't make any sense."

I turned on the TV to see what was going on so that I could call my sister back and clear things up for her. But what I saw made no sense to me.

A plane had flown into one of the towers. And there... came... another one. Holy shit!

She was right. She was also in Manhattan. So was my godmother. My mother was in Brooklyn. Where the fuck was my nephew? I was so many miles from my home and everyone I knew and loved there seemed to be in danger. I spent so many days worrying about the shit that might happen to them...in New York...the city that never sleeps...and that you should never sleep on. My mind was always full of all the dangers that might lurk around some corner, waiting to harm them. But I never thought of any shit like this. I don't think anybody had. It didn't make any sense.

I knew people who were killed in the towers. One of them I'd coached when I was an assistant football coach at my old high school. Another was a friend, Mark, who I'd played basketball with in high school. He did most of the playing. I mostly sat on the bench. But as I pulled those pine splinters out of my ass Mark and I did a lot of joking around. That's what I remember about him. He was always smiling or laughing or joking. I won't disrespect his memory by pretending that we were best friends or even that we'd been in touch since the high school days. But I can say that I was sad in a specific way for Mark, who I never knew to have anything other than a smile and a kind word for those around him. I was sad for his family, who I was sure had shared many more laughs with him than I had and who would surely miss him in the worst way.

But all of that would come later. I didn't feel any sadness or melancholy immediately. I just felt pissed. May be it was the New Yorker in me. But I was ready to see some asses get whupped behind that shit. I thought of a friend who'd been schooling me about bin Laden years earlier and thought immediately that he was so horrifically right. And I told another friend that we should just tell Afghanistan to give his ass up or there'd be a hole in the map where they used to be. But it turns out that things were not that simple.

Flags waved. And I was going to buy one to flap above my SUV. (Now, that's a complicated image.) But then I heard about the Puerto Ricans who got beat up by a mob who assumed they were Arab. And I thought, "That doesn't make any sense." So, I didn't wave my flag because I wasn't for going out and stomping brownskinned people and it seemed that I might be aligning myself with that if I did wave a flag.

Then came Iraq. And I thought, "That doesn't make any sense." After all, we were supposed to be righting the wrong of 9/11 and Saddam didn't have anything to do with that. But a lot of Americans were convinced he did. That didn't make any sense either. But off we went.

Suddenly the reality of my cousin being chased down the streets of Lower Manhattan by a cloud of dust and debris that he described as being like the real-life version of "The Blob" became blurred by the fallacies fed to us by politicians on every side who sought to further their agendas and careers. Congressional voting would be so twisted and turned by politicians and the pundits who lend them credibility that the American public would in the end have trouble telling its elbow from its asshole in the so-called "War on Terror." And it strikes me that playing politics with a human tragedy doesn't make any sense.

Five years later, financial and political wrangling have held up the rebuilding at Ground Zero. Five years later, conspiracy theories go unchecked as video tapes that could answer questions about what happened at the Pentagon are held by the government. Five years later, Ray Nagin, representing a city victimized by another national disaster, displays a stunning lack of empathy and humanity as he sinpes about the "hole in the ground" that hasn't been fixed up in in New York. Five years later, ABC plans to aid and abet the hijacking of a historical event for political purposes by airing a "docudrama" filled with facts that are, at best, in question. Five years later, the 9/11 widows have been publicly insulted and attacked by Ann Coulter. Five years later, the nation seems content to debate whether blow jobs or the clearing of brush were the distraction that allowed 9/11 to happen. Five years later, many Democrats are paying the price for the cowardice they showed in following the pack when the courage to be the voice of dissent was needed. Five years later, I shudder at the heightened religious overtones of the international political landscape. Five years later, I wonder if God -- if there is any, if he/she/it is on any side in a violent struggle -- would want the world this way. Five years later, my heart is broken...again. Five years later, and still it doesn't make any sense.