Send In the Clowns

#290 Send In the Clowns

The genius Libertarians have one thing right, at least. The government has become useless. They’re wrong about most everything else: anarchy is better than government. Liberty (or license?) Freedom (from what?) But they’re right about the government, though they don’t understand what that means.

The dolts who are running things don’t seem to realize that they’re running for office or running in place or running backward because they don’t understand what government is for.

The legislature figures its job is making laws, and that’s what it does, the devil may care what the effects are. The executive branch figures its job is to run everything and it tries. At the moment, it’s running everything into the ground. The judicial branch is busy rubber stamping whichever of the previous two are in power. And the fourth branch, capital, doesn’t know what it’s doing or even what it’s supposed to do.

The sum of this ugly equation is this: we’re being turned into – or back into – a nation of farm animals.

To which the only proper response is “moo you!”

The government used to be the brakes on the rest of us. Front disc, rear drum. No more. The pedal swings down to the floor without you even having to push it.

The government used to be infrastructure – a unifying force. Something that held us all together, or maybe mostly together. No more. It’s a separate world.

Here in 21^st Century America, you have an attorney general who doesn’t know about the law, a Supreme Court Justice who regularly and literally falls down on his face. You have a political Master Technician who aw shuks-es about how small he really is – just part of a team. You have a Secretary of State who has zero qualifications, but was a professor. You have a deputy who can’t deputy his way out of a casting couch accusation.

You have Senators who get snagged in men’s room rendezvous, and a President who degrades the degrees offered by two of the nation’s three most prestigious university’s, Harvard and Yale by dancing on the table at a beanie party at which the main “drink” is coke and coke.

You have a country with hardly a smokestack that works, that thinks it’s the world’s brain and is really the world’s paralyzed frontal lobe.

America, land of poisoned Barbie Dolls and poisoned dogfood. (Good thing they caught that before most of us pensioners started having to eat it, else there would have been an elderly population implosion instead of a few dead poodles.)

To the current crop, the antedote to these poisons is more poison.

And look who’s coming to dinner! The car arrives. It’s a Mini Cooper. How many clowns can you fit in it? Well, all the presidential candidates have been seen getting out in the same ring of the circus.

You have to hope that during the ride from the back of Barnum’s tent to the center of the center ring no one got smooshed or groped, and no one had garlic before the main event.

The ringmaster has no clothes.

Steven Sondheim was right about sending in the clowns: “Don’t bother. They’re here.”

So why aren’t we laughing?

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR