Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red white and blue shoe strings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61.
“Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.” I can relate to that. Six or eight years ago, there was a moisture in the soil that awakened my pacifist roots, roots that were dormant for longer than I care to remember. There was a moisture in the soil but you couldn’t slake your thirst with it unless you were some kind of zomboid avatar of the blood sucking war machine that had spoiled life for millions of Iraqis in the decade following papa Bush’s carnage. The moisture was blood. Toward the end of the Clinton administration I think people were waking up to the fact that a horrible death by diarrhea and dehydration was wrong to inflict on half a million Iraqi children for the sake of enforcing “no fly zones” and “UN sanctions.” Some of us began to help provide water treatment plants to replace those the US and Britain had destroyed.
But then America went mad and permitted George W. Bush to take command. We have been continuously at war since October 7, 2001. It didn’t take much convincing to sell the war to the US. Mad men had destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon and hijacked and destroyed four commercial flights killing all on board. But broadening the war, and continuing the war for six years with no success but the elimination of the Bush family’s arch-enemy, Saddam Hussein, now that was a sales job, a marketing effort, and a defeat for level headed men of reason. Well, as someone once said, “Today it is certainty that is not an option. Failure is almost guaranteed.”
Yesterday I read about the Australian effort to create a cross continent corridor, south to north, to protect a fragile ecology from the rapid advance of global warming. Southern towns are effectively advancing toward the equator at 65 km per year. Today I had a chance to share that story with a respected climatologist, who — although he wouldn’t quantify expectations or predict a tipping point — did point out that the growing season is now enhanced by the excess of carbon dioxide leading to more abundant crops where they will still grow.
Now is the time for a Marketing Transmitted Delusion… see, global warming is good for us… good for us because the CO2 will help the plants grow. Why, here in Wisconsin we’ll soon be growing prize peaches and apples the size of your head!
So it’s not all bad, and that endless war thing doesn’t deserve much thought these days, it being endless anyway. And if anyone wants to get to the roots of the global warming dilemma, they don’t have to go much farther back than the days when Ronald Reagan was warned that if we stripped the Amazon basin we’d be in a world of shit, or to those magic moments when Meg Thatcher and Bush-the-somewhat-brighter said to each other, “Hell… we can let the bastard burn all the oil in Kuwait. We attack. He burns the wells. We get an excuse to kick ass and besides, a little CO2 is good for us all.”
[tags]pearl of great price, gonzo marketing, if you don’t end the damn war I’ll be forced to hold my breath until I turn blue, global warming[/tags]
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