Waking up early this morning due to the time change, I flipped on the radio hoping that the BBC would NOT be reporting on the impending American electoral catastrophe. Someone was talking about lead poisoning.
It was more interesting than you would think. Evidently lead can mess you up in such a way that you become a criminal. Immediately I thought of the Republicans, inhaling all those lead-laden fumes, what with their love of petrochemicals and combustion.
I don't believe much in discontinuities. There is usually some underlying consistency. Look at the sixties, all those folks calling themselves radicals and revolutionaries and it was the same old stuff, to my mind, people declaring themselves to be right and better than everybody else and unloading on the previous generation mercilessly.
And founding Utopian communities in a search for purity and self fulfillment, protesting the hell out of the war, all the while, though those protests pretty much ended with the draft. Suspiciously, I would say, though not to fault anyone. I didn't want to go, not to that war.
But on the war went. What I can't figure out is what has happened to my country since then. We used to be the good guys, or at least think we were the good guys. Okay, at least we aspired to be good. Am I wrong, there?
Now we don't seem to give a shit about anything, except maybe money, and we're correspondingly more self-righteous. Certain elements of it I understand, the Civil War angle, and the resentment revived by civil rights and desegregation.
That Southerners want to get the country back on the right path and have miscegenation punishable by death and so on, old fashioned values. All well and good but how did this outlook ever win the day, in the whole country, all that divisiveness?
And the incredible hatred of government and love of privilege, the violence, the defensiveness, the non-inclusiveness. And the touchiness and aggression, the sense of entitlement, all that stuff. Lead poisoning, that must be it.
Again, I'm looking for the consistency. How did we go from good guys to jerks, so damn quickly? And this lead expert was convincing, that lead is a problem, and that it's in the systems of the people who grew up when it was around, more so than now, and is affecting their brains.
In a bad way. But she also argued that there is a generation in the pipeline unaffected by the lead, born after, especially, they pulled it out of gasoline. That they are peaceniks, that generation, which the Republicans sure as hell are not. May I live to see the day, when the peaceniks are in control.
I will support them. In the meantime what are we to do? It just so happens that I install Finnish saunas as a sideline. Some people think that you can sweat out the lead, no kidding, by using the sauna. In any case I will argue for the beneficial effects.
I want a government contract to install these and to get mean people to use them, starting of course with all those congressional Republicans, since the beneficial effects will be multiplied by their power.
It's only serendipity for me, that I would make a lot of money, and I want my shot of serendipity, like the Republicans, who propose all these tax breaks and military expenditures and deregulation while, serendipitously, getting rich as shit.
Reassuring us constantly that they only want what's good for the country and that they're very patriotic, not self serving at all. I want some of that, to the tune of the cost of one B-1 bomber, let's say. That's a lot of saunas.
And a lot of profit for me. I swear I only want what's best for the country. Will you support me?
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