|
Sound and furry So this is the world we live in. On one moment on the radio (BBC, if you must know), Donald Trump is proudly announcing, “This is an important golf course.” The next moment, you’re (well, OK, me) propelled into the living — and dying — hell that is the eastern Congo. The site, if you’ve been paying attention, of what most observers say is the bloodiest conflict in the world since World War II. An important golf course? Thank god we have an election today to take our minds off the wicked-weird string theory that is the stuff of our daily lives. And if John McCain wins, as he might, rich guys such as Trump will get some more tax cuts, and then, they’ll build some more important golf courses, which will create jobs. Trump’s golf course, it must be admitted, will indeed create 6,000 jobs — which is nothing to sneeze at, even with all the pollen and mold and dust swirling around. The catch is (you knew there was a catch coming, didn’t you?), in this case, Trump’s important golf course will be built in Scotland, and the 6,000 jobs will, the way the world works, be created there. Oh, well. At least the election will trickle down to us. And such an election campaign it has been. I mean, without it, I would never have known that Barack Obama is part of the “other America,” the socialist-Marxist-Muslim America that, quite frankly, I hadn’t known existed. Thank god there is a moose-dresser to let me in on the secret. (Though, I have to confess, I hadn’t known that moose needed to be dressed. I had thought they had these tough hides and thick, hairy coverings that protected them during the long Alaskan winters. Silly me.) Speaking of that “other America,” Saxby Chambliss, a Republican senator from Georgia, clued me in that “the other folks are voting.” He was warning his audience about the large numbers of blacks in Georgia committing the act of early voting. Well, that’s the kind of campaign it’s been. And then there’s Johnny Mav’s brother, Joe McCain. (What? you say. John McCain has a brother? Um, yes. It’s apparently a closely held family secret.) Brother Joe — not to be confused with Joe the Plumber or Joe the Gaffe, Obama’s running mate — recently alerted me to a condition I hadn’t realized existed: Northern Virginia is “Communist Virginia.” This, apparently, because Obama actually has a chance to win Virginia, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since around 1964, when the world was much more communist. Or so I hear. It actually makes sense to me that Northern Virginia is communist, because I got married there, and any place that would allow *me* to get married must be communist. I did marry a woman, by the way — not that it’s any of your business. But — gasp — a German woman. From Berlin. Who translated East German poets. Oh, the communism. And one final note from the campaign: John McCain was born before the invention of the ballpoint pen. Which may explain why he believes cutting taxes for the wealthy and deregulating business, especially financial institutions, is good for the economy. It doesn’t matter, I guess, that we’ve just had eight years of that sort of economic genius, and look how great the economy is doing. I mean, we have a hard-right Bush administration that has, to put it politely, semi-nationalized some of the nation’s financial institutions in order to save them. That’s not socialism, of course, because Obama is the socialist around here, as Johnny Mav and Sarah Mav keep telling us. And they wouldn’t lie. Would they? Oh, well. (I keep saying that. It’s an Irish thing. Or an other America thing. I keep mixing them up.) Tomorrow, we’ll march into a brave new future, which ever one it is. Two things are certainties: East Congo will bleed on. And Donald Trump will build an important golf course. |