the “f” word
What do Carolyn Peterson and George Walker Bush have in common? At first, you might not think there is a connection. One is a mayor of blue town, usa - a real granolaville complete with hippies, environmentalists, and card carrying social workers. There is a rumor that leading members of the Ithaca liberal intelligensia looked into the possibility of annexation with Canada. GWB, on the other hand, is the leader of the free world which seems to be shrinking all the time thanks to his efforts to spread the corporate gospel.
Wait a minute now.
Why has the frigging paperclip on Ezra’s screen, that ridiculous iconic reminder that we live in the worst of all possible times, that surreal companion to Ezra’s morning crap, hunched in front of the keyboard, morphed into a atomic nucleus with a silly punctuation mark spinning around like an electron? Yo, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Ezra sometimes composes the old morning blog as a Word document and you know what he has to contend with, don’t you? Mr. Paperclip. Maybe, you don’t know what Ez is talking about.? Maybe you think he’s losing his marbles. Get the meds. Flip through the DSM IV. Maybe the animated office supply character on Ezra’s screen isn’t a standard feature of Word 2000. Maybe it’s a hallucination. How would you know if you happened to be a born again neo-primitive who had just spent 15 years, hunting and gathering in the backwoods of New Jersey, refining your cave art, cracking walnuts with a tire iron? You re-entered civilization and decided to write your memoirs and suddenly, you were confronted with Mr. Paperclip and all this technology that tells you when you’ve made a spelling error or formatting blooper. Or, how about if you really did have problems with reality, were walking around with a bona fide psychiatric sticky tag and suddenly noticed that this icon on your screen was blinking at you and staring intently at everything you wrote. And what's with the body language? And what's with the sly faces? Why is it making those faces? Does it talk? Holy shit.
Did Ezra lose more than his train of thought, you ask? Nope. We’re talking about appearance and reality this morning. How reality is manufactured, that's right, factory produced by the media, by politicians and all their corporate sponsors. Ezra hates to admit it but all those Frenchies in theoryland like Baudrilliard may be right. Not that Ezra pretends to understand what they’re saying. It’s a frigging simulacrum, that's what it is, where is spell check when I need it, like those sly Frenchies have something on than Bill Gates? You better believe that Microsoft 2005 will have the latest theory buzzwords in spell check. Count on that.
So what does Carolyn Peterson have to do with George Walker Bush? They’re both politicians who have raised enough dough, or in Carolyn's case, baked more zucchini muffins to sell at bake sales than anyone else, bamboozled more retirees, squeezed more flesh, sat through more Rotary meetings to get themselves elected. Prior to being elected, they could say anything they damned well pleased as long as Dan Rather wasn't in the room. Once elected, politicians can say just about anything they damn well please and most people will believe them because they have taken on the role of authority figures in our lives, replacing our parents and teachers. With rank comes privilege. They get to be addressed as your honor, ride around in bullet proof cadillacs, surround themselves with flunkies like Marty Luster or Paul Wolfowitz.
Mr. Bush tells the world that there are WMD’s in Iraq. He even hints that there may be WMD’s planted all over the world, in places where we don’t own all the oil rights yet, and that it’s our duty to spread Freedom and Liberty and the American banking system to all those backwaters where there are fewer than 5 ATM’s. It costs 1,000 American lives to find out that, not only are there no WMD’s in Iraq, but that people over there are not lining up en masse to receive the sacrament of American Democracy.
Getting back to Ithaca, Carolyn Peterson has let it be known that 2005 is the Year of the Pedestrian. Can you believe that? Ezra is not making this up. It was in the Ithaca Urinal last Saturday. In a letter to the Editor. The Year of the Pedestrian. Is that why the city is erecting that mega-parking garage behind the Library at the cost of millions? Could that explain why the parking ramp on Green St
now resembles a working model of Crick and Watson's double helix? Is that why some poor woman was mowed down by a SUV on Albany Street, dragged fifty feet to her death, and the driver walked away with a slap on the wrist from the new Police Chief? And a complimentary snow shovel at Home Depot? Hey, Carolyn baby, the word is not getting out to the speed demons on Seneca St who sometime forget to slow down at the traffic lights. Your message is also not getting out to the absentee landlords in Ithaca who never shovel their walks. If this is the Year of the Pedestrian, you better issue snow shoes. SO look at it this way. If you're stupid enough to believe that 2005 is the Year of the Pedestrian, you’re probably stupid enough to believe that there were WMD’s in Iraq.
According to the independent accountants who get paid to sit in the audience with hand clickers during inaugural addresses, Bush used the “F” word 27 times, the “L” word 25 or some variation or another. That’s important to know because the speech otherwise wouldn’t have made any sense, having been typed out as it was by a team of Texas ranchers assembled in the Oval Office, armed with dictionaries, a copy of the US Constitution and a lunch bucket filled with bananas. The same squad of ranchers were later sent to Iraq to help out with the upcoming elections.
Ezra used to get his mouth washed out with Palmolive or Irish Spring as a kid when he used the other “f” word. Christ, if the nuns ever heard you use an "f" word, forget it. You owned a corner of the room for a year. Maybe even a trash can to sit in so that the other kids in the class got the point. You had a garbage mouth. Bush obviously has immunity because he stood up there in front of the nation and rattled out "f" words like a machine gun right in front of all those Supreme Court justices dressed like nuns. It’s not fair, is it?
How does Ezra get away with comparing a word like freedom with the real "f" word? If you live in Iraq or some other part of the world coveted by US corporations. American style democracy must seem a lot like gang rape. A lot of Iraqis have lost their entire families, their homes, their livelihoods, their dignity. Words like “freedom” and “liberty” lose any kind of meaning when they are tossed around on the point of a bayonet, scribbled on the walls of Abu Grahv prison, placed in context of those dark places we've created like Guatanomo Bay outside the pale of international law. Words like freedom and liberty have suddenly entered the pornographic lexicon of power and corporate mind control. You have the freedom to vote, yes, but the candidates won't be announced until the day of elections because we've sort of created this mess over there. Oh, and we've preseleted them. And written the constitution.
At least Carolyn doesn’t use any of the “f” words in her speeches. She's been known to say "fondue" a lot.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:25 AM
