Patton Oswalt is one of the funniest standup comedians out there. He's growing up and he's still very funny. I didn't think he would hold on. He knows his audience bang on. I watched part of his latest special and he starts off a joke about how he hates Bush and the War.. and the audience erupts. The funny part is that he hates hippies and finds NPR to be unlistenable radio. Best mocking of NPR ever. Then he does a joke about babies being bald, shirtless humans with a bag of crap around their waists. Funny as well. But I smell that Hollywood vibe and the line about poisoning the planet with babies. He says he hates middle aged people who have sobered up apologizing to him, or people walking up with babies. Why not give an award to people who handled their liquor and their gonads and didn't poison the planet with vomit (directly or through the offspring)?
Now I switch to the Gulf of Mexico. Stay with me now. Everybody hates Obama because they thought he would be able to handle stuff like this, and he's just not handling it. This *is* his Katrina and he is blaming capitalism and extorting the capitalists and all that for his audience and Obama fans are suggesting this spill is causing us to "watch our ecosystem destroyed in a crime of almost incalculable dimensions and consequences". Me, I see a dozen people dead and maybe 20 billion in damage. Hmm where did I get that figure? But that's just a drop in Fannie Mae's bucket.
But it's the expectation American peasants have built up around the process of governing that is out of whack with reality. This world of events is not just shit hitting the fan, it's gale force wind bearing down on a four acre feedlot, and that's just the beginning. What Obama has yet to have is the day when his people screw up and the investigations continue for years. Wait until his Abu Graibh, then the pissing and moaning will really kick up a notch. But it's because of a pushbutton mentality.
Somehow Americans have come to think that they can put the right body in the Oval Office and the awesome power of his rock and roll can deflect bullets, or turn beaters into Ferarris like something out of a ZZ Top video. They think that narrowing down the complexities of the world to a phrase like 'Axis of Evil' is a sign of arch stupidity and that they should expect failure after failure coming from a stupid man from Texas (a stupid state). The solution, according to such people, is to hire a slick talking dude from Harvard who can talk his way out of a paper or plastic bag. And they picked well. But what they didn't understand is that ... Well babies are bald, shirtless humans with bags of crap around their waists. But you don't get an award for not having them. You get an award for having them and working through the mess they create without the benefit of magic. Wars are bloody, awful, horrid affairs where you kill the enemy until he loses his desire to fight back. That's peace, when people are too bloodied to vent their deadly frustrations. Oil drilling is deadly dangerous work. That's why the people who work on oil rigs are called roughnecks. And guess what. There is no pushbutton solution. There is no single hole to plug. There is no neat collection of asses to kick. Huge parts of the world are inherently unpredictable, messy and chaotic and you can never control them from the White House. But neither this President nor the people who elected him believe that.
Yet.
Keep pushing the button. Nobody will come. I told you so.
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