Kim Clisters, a really nice kid who plays pretty good tennis for a Momma, was struggling to put away the Polish girl after winning the first set easily in the Australian Open quarterfinals.
"The State of the Union is on! ," my soul mate and social planner said. "Turn it on."
I risked civil disobedience. I didn't know how this second set was going to end; I knew exactly the kind of bullshit Dr. Kidglove was delivering. More articulate, for sure, than George Bush's bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. So I stayed tuned to the tennis.
One hates to be an uninformed citizen, however. I read Dr. Kidglove's text today.
The head of the United States of Goldman Sachs, Corporatocracy Inc. and the Empire of Endless War called John Boehner a working class hero and declared that we as Americans "share . . . a common creed." Has he repealed freedom of religion? He celebrated because "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back, corporate profits are up." Golly Gee, happy are we who thanks to that roaring stock market have recouped nearly 10% of what we lost in the great recession!
Whoopee Dee, whee, whee, whee that corporations, which are really just people, just like you and me, are making bigger profits. I'll bet that Exxon person, who was the most profitable corporation in the history of money even before he (she?) became a person, will put another hundred million or so into the pockets of degree-holders willing to become change-denying climate science whores. Never mind whether they have any actual expertise in climate science.
Climate change -- which is merely the biggest threat to human health and welfare since the development of the atomic bomb -- didn't even rate a mention in Dr. Kidglove's corporate-sanitized oratorical Librium. He rhapodized about how the fishing has improved without mentioning that the dam was breaking upstream.
His ecstasy about corporate profit left no room to mention unemployment, either. The offricial rate in this country is close to 10 per cent, but the real rate is probably closer to 20 per cent if you count all the starving workers doing part-time jobs or those who have been unemployed so long that they've quit looking for work. Are the jobless still part of the union?
Dr. Kidglove patted himself and his Republican playmates on the back for preserving the tax cuts for the richest two per cent of us and celebrated that greatest of all national myths, The American Dream. Once upon a time home ownership was part of that dream.
Dr. Kidglove did not mention the bleak fact that in the year just ended, Americans purchased fewer new homes than in any year in the last half-century. Sales for all of 2010 totaled 321,000, a drop of 14.4 percent from the 375,000 homes sold in 2009.It was the fifth consecutive year that sales have declined after hitting record highs for the five previous years.
Nor did he mention the record rate of foreclosures -- many of them illegal -- on the homes that were sold during those record high years.
In Melbourne, Kimmy finally closed out that second set, thanks as much to her opponent's unforced errors as to her own good play.
But a win is a win is a win and she's a nice kid.
Makes ya feel good, ya know?
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
