Slightly Off Center                       

Choose Heads or Tails

Maybe it’s just me.  Let’s see if I’m getting this right.  

        When we were children it was the Communist menace, the threat from the Bolsheviks and the ever-rising Red Tide.  Meanwhile, at just about the same time, industry and technology begot what is is – what we’ve come to know to be reality today.

  Forgive me, I digress.

We prayed the wars would end. Korea, Vietnam - proceeded by a mere few years earlier the events our grandparents and parents lived through - and knew first-hand - the horrors and devastation of WWII. Whilst some still have the memories and nightmares from the war to end all wars: WWI, "a diplomat's delight". Most of the survivors who could tell us of their experiences about those times and decisions are gone...no interviews, no videotape.

         So much for the storytelling of history.

     Still and stilled we prayed and prayed the wars would end – and they did.  The bell tolled for thou and thee leaving victims, citizens – all due to each nation state’s version of their own Manifest Destiny.  In the brief quiet, solemn time allotted to bury the dead of three generations, our youth was gutted and left aghast.  We watched and witnessed in one tumultuous decade hence here in the Land of Free and The Home of the Brave the assassinations of a young president, a black prophet of war, a black prophet of peace, a president’s brother, and a near-miss attempt on a bigoted governor.

           I hope I didn’t miss anyone. But you get my drift. Bye Bye American Pie, now known as the day the music died and citizen’s protests were forever silenced and squashed.  

Then the Iron Curtain began to fray. We lost our best buddy. Our reason to exist; our natural enemy; our evil twin. As the band played on, our government officials downsized our military buildup. Not missing a beat, our government made our largest export, not democratic ideals, but weapons of mass destruction. A time of peace we were told with a side order of Somalia, Nicaragua, Iran, and Iraq. 

      To be totally inclusive, and so our Asian brothers and sisters don't feel left out, after a hiatus of thirty years, don't worry, the Taiwan card, or domino has yet to fall.

               So sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.  

Our fears mutated and morphed, we went from fearing enemies from foreign shores to the enemy within.  So we began the decades of decadence and debauchery.  From unsafe sex so flows the liquor, so goes the ingestion of coke, pills, pot – least we forget those prescribed ones – so goes well with the soft-sell commercials and the candy-coated medications – so it be said, so it be told. 

    Seems to me what was meant to be our salvation might be our damnation.

   Technology, Inc. is faster, cheaper and has the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.  In our youth they checked our hands and nails, no one wanted to be a bad bee but a good bee could be would be just maybe.  But baby oh baby, now they check our hair follicles, our excretions, our DNA, our proclivity towards violence, background reports on post-traumatic victimization’s, as well as evidence to substantiate the lack of self-esteem or the over-abundance of the same.  All this information just to purchase a newspaper, let alone get a job, or health insurance (here their concern is our susceptibility toward disease), or a fishing license, or jeez, just to play high school sports.  

                     This obviously, and undeniably is an affront to our civil liberties and a mockery of our Constitution making the McCarthy hearings of old look like some high jinks of Goebbel proportions.  Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself again.

                 To a new generation, the torch was past.  Almost extinguished by the tears of Camelot.  Yet we picked up our fumbled pass and gave light to our own heaping on of new layers of bilge and scum to the already badly stained and tarnished face of the facades that once represented our mystical institutions.  From Watergate to Weenie-gate, it’s all the same.  Those who are elected in a ritualistic manner to represent our well being and interest have to answer to a higher authority of interest and well being - an entity that hovers omnipotently above us mere mortals. Left with no right to assemble we are dared, no demanded, in our new, improved police state to cow-tow.

 Yet, every four years instead of an election booth to cast a legitimate vote, we stand on line in some fast food cafeteria with a chic, hip new name, in a sterile techno environment to cast our order instead. “Want fries with that?”

 Be it Bush, be it Gore, to be or not is not the question, but whether it is better to suffer the slings and arrows of our misfortune. Let it be said, let the record show, one candidate has a natural proclivity towards embellishment, no call it what it is lying. The other candidate has his own brand of, a humanistic proclivity, to “hit the switch to snuff out crime”.

   I suggest a write-in ballot of Richard M. Nixon. Let's dig him up, prop him up - At lease we are certain of what he is capable of...God Bless America.

  © Philip J.. Rappa 2002

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Alpha and Omega
Rhapsody in Democracy
Requiem for the Silliness I Learned in Civics Class
Oh-Sum-Bodies-Been-Lying
Help Me If You Can, I'm Feeling Bad
Fear & Loathing in America
Choose Heads or Tails
Open Letter to the President
In God We Trust
The House Always Wins
We The People
Salted Peanuts
Enough Ranting - Just For Fun

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