Madness at the Edge of Town
"The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up." So said D.H. Lawrence. I wonder if he was provoked to such a remark from the daily news. ‘Cause there’s certainly plenty of material there.
For instance, a report that says one out of five our children age six to twelve is left home alone after school. This, in a sizzling economy. Now I don’t know about you, but I gotta admit there were some holes in my thinking back then. As wonderful a child as I was, I still needed parenting, and wasn’t on my own until I went away to college. Ya gotta think that the best hope for most of these children, tragically, is that they are just watching television.
Another winner is the Nigerian official who says environmental warnings be damned, it’s necessary to fast-track food production in Africa, regardless of the risks. Risks like genetic mutations, abuse of pesticides, and other ecological hazards. Please, as desperate as is the situation, the only realistic solutions are population control, basic hygiene, and clean water.
The folks who do Dubya’s TV say it was an inadvertent mistake that a Bush-Lite commercial has the word "rats" running across the screen after talking about the opposition. Yeah right, but worse than the blatancy of their lie is their remarkable stupidity in thinking that the fallout would be outweighed by the benefits. These people keep shooting themselves in the foot, and one of these days, they’re going to blow off the tops of their empty heads.
Bill Clinton voted in the New York primary yesterday amidst all sorts of hullabaloo that it was the first time he got to vote for his wife. Describing the opportunity to cast a ballot for Miz Agonistes, after her supporting him for lo these thirty years, Slick Willie said, It was a thrill. Uh-huh. Do you really think he voted for her?
The feds say that military giant TRW may be guilty of fraud in the national missile defense pipedream. TRW allegedly faked tests to support their "hit to kill" technology which simply doesn’t work, and the fraud seems to go back for years. Of course, with the FBI on the case, it will likely go on for many more years.
Thousands of really stupid people are out a ton of money. They were invited to send $100 bills wrapped in foil to people they’d never met in hopes of garnering a windfall. They fell for the wind. The scam was allegedly organized by a man named Hood, if you can believe it, and netted in the neighborhood of $20 million. There’s something Darwinian about fleecing the brain dead.
When I was in my teens, my father had me read a number of books that weren’t required in school. One was Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. Here’s what Sabatini said about his hero. "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony."
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.