A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
Friday night the bars, boutiques and bistros on the Commons started filling up again. Suddenly there were actually people downtown after 6 pm.

It wasn't the British invasion. ("I wanna hold your hand.")

No, it wasn't Bush's invasion either. More like schlock and brawl than 'shock and awe.'

And they definitely aren't Arabs even though they throw their money around like little oil glutted sultans out on the town in Switzerland.

It's the students! Ithaca's own endearing invasion force, loaded up with credit card gelt, nice Florida tans, Chinese army shirts, state of the art jeans. Hey, Ezra wants to know which designer came up with the idea of putting something resembling paint stains on the backs of jeans. Like you missed the 'wet paint' sign and sat down on a park bench anyway. That dude must have made a fortune! Why doesn't Ezra ever come up with million dollar trend setting, blockbuster ideas like that? Maybe he could convince kids to start carrying pitchforks? Just like the dude in the American gothic painting by ---Ezra wants to say Grant Wood ---but he's terrible with names. Can you spell Alzheimer's?

Designer pitchforks, yeah, that's the ticket! Imagine working in a coatroom somewhere and having to deal with hundreds of pitchforks? Apply for hazardous duty pay immediately! Detroit would have to install pitchfork holders in their 2004 model cars. But the dough would be rolling in like Iraqi oil after Bush gets done. Ezra wouldn't have to live in Ithaca anymore! He could buy Ithaca just like his namesake.! Turn it into an amusement park. He could afford to ransom the lake water from Cornell. You know, they pump it up there ostensibly to cool or heat their buildings , then pump it back loaded up with who knows what contaminants.
People downtown are starting to glow in the dark! Green! Just like your screen when you're watching Bush bomb the daylights out of Baghdad. Night visions.

Don't the students know there's a war on? Or are they going to cover that next semester?

They walk around, flipping their credit cards, cruising the shops, bopping up and down on their bar stools, laughing and carrying on like they don't know that Iraqi kids are ducking 2,000 lb bombs, that people are dying in the Middle East? Like your mother used to say to get you to eat your vegetables - folks are starving in Africa.

Ezra would like to dress up in sackcloth and ashes, parade around on the Commons carrying a sign - The End is Near! Repent! Stand outside of Simeon's or Moonshadow, staring inside the window like some fierce incarnation of John Brown, wagging his fist. That would change the conversation from how I spent my spring break. But would Ezra get arrested for disturbing the peace? Demonstrating without a permit? Impeding the wheels of commerce in our little dystopia here in Ithaca?

Ezra's friend, Jake, talked about the war today. Jake was a Vietnam vet who went apeshit faced with all the killing and slaughter he saw over there. They had to put him in an appliance shop fixing things to calm him down. He still fixes appliances for people. Jake mentioned how this latest war is a defining moment for America. How public morality is declining and going out of our lives completely. We don't insist that our leaders act morally, that they follow accepted international conventions for dealing with conflicts. No, we let them go to war on the most specious of arguments, invade a country that didn't attack us or anyone else for that matter in the last 10 years. We pit Saddam's dubious morality against our own questionable motives for securing his vast oil fields, throwing our weight around as the world's only superpower, all under the pretext of a war against terror designed to produce more terror than we will know what to do with. Hey, we're pissing off millions of Arabs! Anti-war demonstrators are being shot in Yemen, not what you would call a pro-American playground to begin with! We call the UN 'irrelevant' because it blocks our global ambitions at the same time we bypass our own so-called democratic institutions. Shouldn't Congress declare war? How many little executive actions will it take, how many precedents of the White House going it alone, will it take to undermine that assumedly august body and make it 'irrelevant?" Is this a paradigm shift for us with dire consequences for the future?

Hey, it doesn't matter. It's Friday night and we're partying in Ithaca like it's 1999 like the Prince song goes. Read the studies, dude. Public man died a miserable death in a nursing home with oxygen tubes running up his nose, wheezing and coughing, rubbing his greasy bathrobe and dreaming of the '60s. The personal is the global and the global rights belong to Phil Knight, AOL/Time Warner, George Bush and the empire of the commodity.

You ever live with cats who throw up a lot? Wake up in the middle of the night to take a piss, walk out into the living room and squish!! You step right into a pile of disgorged Tuna Feast lying on the carpet. S - -T! That's the way it feels living in the US of A these days.

Hey, how does Ezra do it every day? Provide semi-amusing commentary day in and day out, smoking 2 packs of cigarettes, a 40oz of Budweiser every night so he can hit the hay early and get up to write this stupid blog! Man, it should be fun! That's what RB says anyway. Instead Ezra's fingers are tingling, his gums are receding and what does he get for his trouble? No emails with encouragement, no little envelopes containing cash, no offers from babes in Arkansas to marry him, no product endorsements. He can't even get AK Press, the largest distributor of radical literature in America, to buy the ad banner on top of his blogspot. (Maybe he should try Fancy Feast, the cat food maker? Ezra spends a ton of money on that crap every year!) Hey, dudes, contribute a little material! Send the huskies up with some cash, a few co-eds, some Beck's. It's lonely getting up every morning to make the blogs.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 5:40 AM