Another Reason to Laugh or Cry

The Park Service went one step closer today toward designating the first nuclear reactor as a national landmark which would have the effect of preserving it for posterity. This giant concrete affair with pipes and valves and control rods had one purpose: to make fuel for the killer bomb. The idea of the peaceful atom came much later; after a hundred thousand civilians were incinerated in an instant (actually two instants a few days apart) thanks to the efforts of secret science. Now there is no point in discussing whether the bomb should have been fashioned or whether it should have been used the way it was in the summer of 1945. The two main reasons to leave it be are number one it's over and number two it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time.
The idea of rangers giving tours like it is the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam, though, is in macabre bad taste of a new lowest order. The Democratic Senator from Washington which is home to the most polluted contaminated nuclear real estate in the western hemisphere praised the finding by the Republican Cabinet person charged with such matters. He is a Idaho anti-conservationist tree-cutter who has never met an environmentalist he would rather not throw in front of bulldozer. Talk about strange bedfellows; it really just proves that politicians of both stripes have no convictions or ethics or morals or standards and should all be shot. Anarchy would be better than continuing to let them ruin the country's economy, culture, civil liberties and stewardship of resources the way they are doing.
The Hanford Reactor is better off being leveled or sealed in a dome of impenetrable concrete. It is not a place to revere or hold hallow or in any way commemorate other than to mark it as a low point in the subversion of science to war-making. The people elected to represent the state it sits in apparently find money more important than character or honesty or doing what is right. Now if Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive Leadership could all be herded into the hottest part of it and entombed, I would pay to go watch them dissolve into radioactive gelatin on closed circuit TV monitors.

Nine Score and Two Years Ago

"Thomas Jefferson lives today." Those words were not true when John Adams spoke them in wishful good faith on the 4th of July in 1826. But media communications being what they were then, how could he have known that Jefferson had preceded Adams in death by just hours that same day? The modern trend toward hagiography being what it is, should anyone be surprised that NPR of all entities pretended to put the death of Jesse Helms into historical context by pointing out the coincidence regarding the deaths of two real actual statesmen on the national holiday back in 1826? And since they did so before his cold blood had turned to ice, I stomp on Helms' dead body to bury his memory with the contempt it deserves. And I do it today while the rockets red glare is scaring the hell out my dogs this Independence Evening.
The comparison being drawn is an insult to the memory of those founding fathers on a Babel-ian scale. Helms and Reagan lowered the bar of fair discourse and rational engagement over ideas and values to the gutter, the sewer, the septic tank that now stinks up the entire political process. Helms does not deserve a funeral or an observation or any fraction of the adulation that is already being bestowed on him by the media he so hated. He created a sub-human sub-culture that has brought us Rush and the ditto-heads not to mention W and the Rovians and Dick-heads. The crucifixion of open minded progressive thought and the individuals who think such thoughts was invented, trademarked, patented and marketed by Helms and his minions. The hate mongering he preached against gay people, sick people, pacifists, scholars, atheists and progressive dreamers has now become the norm. The shift to the right which cannot be reversed anytime soon was started by him and locked in place by the current POTUS and his lying cheating dishonest disingenuous band of mental midgets so don't tell me Helms was a statesman. Don't tell me he is to be respected for his convictions. Don't tell me he is to be mourned. The fact he got as far as he did and got the ear of the electorate is the only thing to be mourned and cursed.
I once read that conservatives assume the worst about humanity in the aggregate, and that the institutions of power must act accordingly to consolidate their own lock on power lest the teeming masses become truly revolting as is their wont. Liberals are thought to believe in man's inherent good nature and that minimal steering of the ship of state is needed to make forward progress. Somewhere that all went completely down the drain; a topic I have tried to shed light on in past blogs but with mostly muddle-headed vagueness. But Helms' legacy does give credence to the part about generally assuming the worst about people. He most certainly was an elitist of self-righteously biblical proportions. The very idea that conservative think tank dwellers know better than the rest of us what is a proper course for the republic, and the politicians who read their books and implement their ideas are to be thanked and revered and re-elected to provide the trickle-down special effects for all to marvel at has endured courtesy of Helms and Reagan and the Bushies. We who don't agree are aliens, vermin, snobs, tree-huggers, faggots and of course liberals. Helms turned that label into a cuss word, and I curse him for that. I call on the deity he so knee-jerk worshiped: God Damn You Jesse Helms to Everlasting Hell for proving that there indeed were enough stupid ignorant people in North Carolina to have given you the pulpit from which to sow your seeds of poison hatred across the land.

Happy Birthday Not

The flag-waving, fire-working, gun-shooting night of self-congratulatory revelry will mark nothing of progress since the last time we arbitrarily marked this position on our trip around our star. If some of you think the new Tom has somehow let go of all the negativity, read on. I did tell my therapist I no longer wish for the destruction of all humanity in a cataclysmic slate-wiping, but that does not change the fact our stupid country led by this stupid ape-like tyrant has nothing to celebrate. We are a blight on civilization, and a selective surgical cataclysmic strike on the middle of the North American continent from beyond or within would be in the best interest of the planet as a whole. It won't happen unless a terrorist finds a way to sail a motorboat up the potomac with a neutron bomb on board; an event I would not celebrate with fireworks or guns or flags but just a sigh of relief. I know, I know: fight your battles at the ballot box. Well, uh. . .don't look now but:
This election cycle is spinning in a little circle like clowns on tricycles in the circus. Is Barack wearing his lapel pin today or not? Is McCain's temper in check today or did he flash at a reporter? They are both scrambling to own the middle-ground lest anyone mistake either one for having any strength of conviction whatsoever. I predict right now that unless one of them takes a powder unwittingly or otherwise, McCain will win and the end will truly be at hand. The current POTUS will either attack Iran or symbolically withdraw a token division from Iraq (or both) in October and Barack will hem and haw his way to oblivion. A wave of expatriates will try unsuccessfully to reach Canada, and the national depression that most of us don't even know we have will descend like a wet blanket. The rich will get richer, the poor will turn on each other and the rest of us will just become more hateful and angry. About this time next year, the new POTUS will prop himself up in front of the cameras to remind us how he suffered in military prison and how we should all be so thankful he made it out alive and wave the flag and shoot some fireworks and drink some of his wife's beer and watch some TV.
That would be digital-only TV which thanks to McCain's tough-guy tactics in Congress, we will be stuck with forever. I hate him for lots of things, but taking away analog TV as we have known it since Roosevelt is a capital offense. All the antique and collectible TVs that my friends and I own will go to permanent snow on all channels a month after he swears on that Bible, and thank you very much mister president. He did this to make his friends rich; like the blood money from all that beer his wife has poured down the gullets of the lower middle class is not enough legacy for him.
I am still mad as hell at the world and especially the governments that are turning Earth into Venus just to protect the giant multinational Wall Street powers that finance their elections and re-elections over and over. I told a friend who has often spoken of killing himself that the only reason to keep on living is to see the next Star Trek movie or read Michael Chabon's new book or to finish that new sculpture he started. I stand by that; an individual suicide by an invisible anonymous grunt of a person is not painless and is not a solution. Too bad the people that really need to die keep on living. Like the Congress and the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court and Wall Street tycoons and Bill Gates and the short list of truly blood sucking parasites whose names fill the airwaves constantly as if they actually amounted to anything. If the bad people could go away, and let the good people take control, I would not have a blog. And my friend would not be lying in bed too depressed to get up and play with his cat and work on his antique TV collection.