Smoke This With Your Turkey
November 23rd, 2005
by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
These may be wasted words, as the Allman Brother’s sang, but here they are.
Rush hour traffic. Plumbing gone bad. Computer servers going up and down. Little Baptist boys serving Jack’s hamburgers for Jesus. The horrendous hum of a vacuum cleaner on 30-year-old carpet.
These are the things to be thankful for living the so-called “American dream” in suburban hell?
It is time to put up the plastic Christmas tree again and pretend all is right with the world.
As Greg Allman sang, “Every other Christmas I would practice good behavior … But don’t ask me to be Mr. Clean. ‘Cause baby I don’t know how.”
This as the Bush administration keeps dissembling about Iraq and the victims of Hurricane Katrina are still scattered about the country, knowing their checks will stop two weeks after Christmas.
It is enough to make a man hate the Supreme Court for handing the election of 2000 to this Ivy League, drug addled frat boy we know in Alabama as the “Texas Soufflé.”
At least we can say we tried to warn the country and the New York Times that a second term for Bush would be disastrous for America.
But did the red state dumbasses or the former national newspaper of record listen?
Of course not.
On the way back from the hardware store the other night with yet another Speakman shower stem valve, stopping for fast food like every other suburbanite in rush hour traffic, we met a young man whose only hope for the future is to one day make manager at Jack’s. He noticed our LocustFork.Net sticker on the back window of the Chevy van and asked what the Web site was about.
“Does it have anything to do with the Locust Fork Baptist Church?” he asked.
In something of a surly mood, I said, “You must be kidding. This is not about some Baptist BS.”
“Well, I guess I won’t be checking it out,” he said, defending his faith like a political sword.
“I was raised a Baptist too,” I said, smiling slyly. “But I got out of here and got smart.”
He didn’t appreciate it and probably spat on my cheeseburger. That is the kind of meanness that passes for Christianity these days in a world led by a publicly pious politician like George W. Bush.
For the record, in case you haven’t already guessed, I hate everything about the suburbs and the car culture that is today’s America.
We tried in the 1960s and ’70s to lead the world in a better direction and create a more sustainable model for society. Many of us got out of the suburbs and moved to the cities and university towns and lived close to work and rode our bicycles whenever possible and used the pill and condoms when we had sex, of course listening to jazz, blues and rock ‘n’ roll.
Now white kids in the suburbs wear their hats crooked and listen to hip hop music and snort crystal meth as they ride up on your bumper in their SUVs.
Is this any way to live?
Is this something to be thankful for?
Sorry, but like Hunter Thompson would say if he were alive and blogging today, we are doomed.
The religious conservatives in this country have taken over the store and are determined to fight a global war with the religious fanatics from the other side of the world until we are all screaming in hell just like the Bible says.
It’s not that the Bible and the Koran were right. It is that there are so many people on the planet now who believe they are right that Armageddon becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Are there any smart, charismatic leaders who can step up and save the day? Not on the horizon here or in any other country, unless it is John McCain. But no matter how much he tries to kiss their ass by supporting Bush publicly, the Republican hierarchy will never support him as the nominee in 2008.
So our only hope may be for some Democrat to emerge from the American woodwork between now and then to pull the world back from the brink.
Otherwise, it is all over folks. No more America. No more democracy. We are going back to the Stone Age in a blaze of fissionable material.
Think about the scene from New Orleans with all the SUVs stuck with no gas in 14-feet of water. Imagine that scene nationwide. By then there will be no FEMA left to save us, and no angel from heaven either.
If Jesus were to come back to earth today, these religious idiots in charge would crucify him again as a long-haired, sandal-wearing, pot-smoking, Communist hippie.
Smoke that with your turkey and go on living with the fact that you are living in a dream world if you think this situation is not going to get much worse and may never get better - unless the folks who believe more in science than religion take back the country.
That is our only hope. It’s not much to be thankful for, but there it is.
“Wasted words may never be heard. But go on home baby and watch it on TV.”
