1039 Happy Birthday, Fatso

1039 Happy Birthday, Fatso

7/4/12.  Happy Birthday, America.   You managed another year despite all the efforts to kill you.  But you’re not wearing your age well.  Or your weight.

We’ve grown fat and sloppy.  We value minutia over principle, and invoking principle when we defend our lunacy of the moment. We’ve become a nation of gunsels who start huge fires on tinder-dry shooting ranges and then, when those commies in Utah tell us to stop, we crab about our Second Amendment rights.  Legislators in Utah want a temporary stop to shooting on state land and that’s an abridgement of your right to bear arms?  What about public safety and the cost of fighting fires.

We’re hoarding gold, the principle behind which is a survivalist doomsday scenario in which the country collapses.  Eat your ingots when the Wal-mart is overrun by the barbarians (from Mexico.)

We’re using civil rights laws to dictate emotions.  White guy shoots black guy or vice versa and it’s a “hate crime.”  That makes death worth more?

We hide pedophiles.

We call the people who send jobs overseas “job creators.”  (Are you listening, MItt?)

And today, we shoot off fireworks celebrating... what?  The elevation of mediocrity to greatness?  Making heroes of the Kardashians and the Palins and the Ron Pauls and the Rush Limbaughs.

Let’s all watch Macy’s rockets’ red glare over the Hudson while Regis Philbin quacks and prattles about what a great country this is.

We’ve forgotten the difference between liberty and license.

We have no credible liberal establishment and a right wing establishment that can’t read, can’t think, knows nothing of history and knows nothing of compromise.

We’re focused on illegals, we’re focused on our third Vietnam -- Afghanistan -- and on 500 channels of TV and the red carpet (how many of them ARE there?)  Meantime, we send young men and women off to get killed and call it patriotic heroism.   We’re focused on calorie counts for movie popcorn and on the size of Pepsi cups.  And the country that parented (parented? Politically correct enough for you?) the mass production auto industry can’t build a car that holds up under use on the highways we also don’t know how to make anymore?


So happy birthday, America.  You managed another a year in spite of us.  But remember -- and you’ve heard this from this space before:  We didn’t get to be the way we were by being the way we are.

Shrapnel:

--Who is more American than L.L. Bean, whose centenary his company is observing this year with ruffles and flourishes and free shipping.  But if the voter ID law applied to Maine would mean L.L. couldn’t vote.  In his day, they didn’t issue birth certificates up there.


--Andy Griffith (1926-2012) may have been the most underrated major actor who ever worked on Broadway or in Hollywood.  While he was best known for the silly TV show that added "Mayberry" to the language, it hardly was a showcase for his talents.  Just ask anyone who ever saw "No Time for Sergeants" or "A Face in the Crowd."

Coming Friday:  The Man Behind the Curtain and the Los Angeles Associated Wes takes another swing at the the Supreme Court.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
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