Abandon Mythology

Although I’ve found numerous things to complain about during our new preznit’s brief tenure, I’ve been withholding criticism because I remember quite clearly all my right-wing friends back in 2001 insisting that any significant events occurring during the first 8 months or so of a presidency were the result of the previous preznit’s policies. (See, that’s why 9/11 was so obviously the Clenis’ fault instead of dubya’s.)

By this logic, the new guy has a good 4 months left before anything is his fault, right? I went lurking in some right-wing blogs just to confirm they were giving Michelle’s husband the same grace period they gave dubya, and guess what? Not so much. I’m not going to link to any specific blogs, because I don’t want them coming around here stinking the place up, but here’s a random sampling of comments:
 

Some of you idiots need to wake up and wise up. Obama is dangerous.

I feel sorry for people living in Alaska. They are way too close to NK. The way this WH occupier works who knows if there is enough defense to protect them.

Obamania’s sheeple are deeply delusional, and as Obama’s enablers, these fools are going to get us killed.

When will Washington grow up and realize that there pathetic games have real consequences? When LA is in flames? New York a heap in a river? This is ridiculous.

The USA used to be somewhat of a threat to them. No longer. It is “free pass” time for the tyrants of the world.
This will not end well.

Is he stupid, ignorant, delusional, evil or a combination of all? My jury is still out…
One thing is for sure, he’s 100% liberal, which is DANGEROUS.

I tell you, that’s one paranoid bunch of patriots. You can almost smell the flop sweat. At first I wanted to dive into those comments sections and point out how even though the US spends more on defense than all the other countries on the planet combined, these supposedly proud Amurkins are still soiling themselves in constant fear. I wanted to scream at these nitwits to MAN THE FUCK UP, but after a while spent reading through this garbage, my anger turned to sadness and pity. It dawned on me that these people believe these things because their heroes tell them to:
 

When Neil Cavuto and Rush Limbaugh are worried, America better listen.

They long ago gave over their critical thinking skills to the talking heads on hate radio and the Fox News Outrage Channel who get paid huge amounts of money to keep pushing a now largely marginalized ideology. The right has become an echo chamber wherein “conservatives” extract self-esteem from their own (largely imagined) victimization. This has lead to a disturbing lack of awareness and a bloodthirsty callousness that allows them to believe fellow Americans who seek peaceful solutions to world problems are somehow traitors and we should instead return to dubya’s belligerence-based foreign policy.

In my travels around the right-hand side of the intertoobz, I also began compiling a list of nicknames for our preznit that I hadn’t heard before. So far I’ve got Dear Leader, The One, Odopey,  Odumbo,  Onutzoid,  Obummer,  Obie,  President Superfly,  King Obamarafat,  Big Pimpin’,  Opie the Kenyan big eared dimwit, and Black Chavez. I think I’ll stick to Michelle’s husband for now.

And last, but certainly not least:

Anyone who fights against terrorism is a hero. They fight for the freedom of all humans in this world. The way terrorists fight is so barbarious and terrifying. How can anyone, even the best of all soldiers, protect himself from an invisible bomb? It is such a vicious way to fight.

I’ll say. How does one protect one’s self from a “barbarious” invisible bomb? Moreover, how do the terrorists build the damn things in the first place? Now I’m scared, too.

My long-suffered aversion to change has caused me a great deal of perplexity these last few months. When my old blogging software went haywire, I quickly found some new software that served essentially the same purpose as the old stuff, but it didn’t look exactly the same. The mulish stubbornness of my hillbilly heritage got the better of me and I wound up spending an absolutely stupid amount of time learning more about HTML and CSS and PHP than I ever really cared to know. All to make my site look, to the casual observer, as if I hadn’t done anything.

I tell you, it gets crazier in here every day. If I live long enough to be very elderly, I am most likely going to be one kooky, cranky old man. I’m declaring myself to be done with this foolishness. I’m stacking the books and notes and such off to the side for a while. Back to blogging in 3..2..1..

When I was a kid, way back before the Wal-Martization of American retail, grocery stores gave out savings stamps. They came in all the same denominations as money, right down to the penny, and with every purchase the cashier would hand over both a receipt and a quantity of stamps equal to the purchase. Customers then saved these stamps and used them to purchase any number of items from special stamp catalogs. Different stores gave out different kinds of stamps, so it was a way for grocers to ensure customer loyalty. Sometimes a grocer would declare a certain day of the week to be “double stamp day” and the aisles would be crowded.

My grandmother would always put her stamps in the junk drawer next to her kitchen sink, and every summer my sister and I would dig them all out and spend a few hours licking and pasting them into the empty stamp books. (Decades later, I can still taste that nasty glue.) Then we would divide up the books and start leafing through that year’s catalog like greedy little treasure hunters.

My kids recently dug one of those long-forgotten treasures out of one of the many boxes of useless crap I’ve accumulated over the years. Check these babies out. 

The FCC Identification stamp on the bottom shows they are GE Model #3-5961C, manufactured December 1975 in Taiwan Republic of China. 

It’s hard to imagine in today’s wireless world, but in the bicentennial summer of 1976, these were the shit. Advanced technology. My family was still a year or more away from our first color television. Our old black and white set picked up 4 or 5 stations, and some of those only with a good deal of antenna twisting. Cell phones and personal computers existed only in the realm of science fiction.

But with these I could jump on my bike and ride around talking to a friend up to a mile away. Not only that, but they operated on Citizen’s Band Channel 14 (27.125 MHz), so I could talk to truckers and anyone else with a CB radio.  In those days that was pretty much everybody; Detroit was even turning out cars with CBs built right into the dash. 

I tried explaining to my kids just how cool that was back then, but they started getting glassy-eyed almost immediately, only wanting to know if they still worked. Sadly, fresh batteries produced only a high pitched squeal from one and static from the other. Sigh.

Every man’s memory is his private literature. – Aldous Huxley