People keep asking me what’s happened to the Balcony, why it hasn’t been updated in several weeks, stuff like that. Hey, life happens, seizes control of every waking moment and chokes off the creative impulse. I’ll try to do better but can make no promises.
Michael Jackson died. I missed the hoopla, the televised memorial service, all the media interviews with the parasites and hangers on who call themselves commentators and purport to speak authoritatively about matters they can know nothing about. Jackson had an enormous talent and a very weird existence almost from the time he slipped out of his mother’s womb. His father is creepy and conniving, and the turn Michael took later in his life was bizarre and, ultimately, sad. Nobody, however, really knows what it was like to be Michael Jackson, to stroll around in his medically lightened epidermis or to breathe through his surgically-altered nose or to feel what he felt in the middle of the night when sleep refused to come and the weight of his tarnished legend became too heavy to bear. Media people speculate, and their speculation is passed off as fact, but they don’t know.
Several years ago, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said that America was locked into a downward spiral of sheer dumbness, and much that has happened since only confirms the Doctor’s analysis. Barack Obama has discovered the time-worn truth that running for president is one thing, and being president another. Obama says the right things in an inspiring way, but the man is surrounded by status quo types who wouldn’t know how to rock a toy boat in a bathtub. The economic “stimulus” package was too small and timid to do much good for average folks, and the Big Pain still lies in front of us. The media and the government fixate on the stock market, but jobs and wages are the real deal, and those aren’t being addressed by anyone in a meaningful way. By the time the political class focuses on jobs and wages, it will be too late. We’re on borrowed time and playing roulette with borrowed money.
Lobbyists for the insurance industry have already derailed Obama’s attempt to reform our absolutely broken health care system. The so-called “public” option – which polls show that a majority of Americans would welcome – is too threatening to Cigna and Aetna and United Healthcare, and the lobby for these profitable giants is so powerful that it can stymie any change that might start the process of dislodging insurance companies from the health care driver’s seat. American CEO’s talk about competition like it’s the Holy Grail, but when it comes right down to it, CEO’s hate competition and prefer the sure, safe profits that monopolies produce and perpetuate. The insurance lobby is on a war footing, armed with large amounts of cash and an ideological rap about the evils of “socialized” medicine. Money and a bullshit argument is all it takes to prevail in America; you don’t have to be right or factual, just loud and persistent.
Sarah Palin is an idiot, OK? This should be the end of the story, but again, this is America and what should be obvious isn’t. Half the political commentators in the country think Palin made a sound political calculation when she decided to bail from the Governor’s mansion, mid-term, even though her justification for the decision sounded ludicrous, self-serving and disconnected from any objective reality. When Palin compares Alaska to the rest of America I giggle uncontrollably because the comparison is ridiculous; no professional journalist should take Palin seriously or allow her to get away with such mindless drivel. Palin is dumber than W. Bush, but no less dangerous. Because the Republican party is in retreat and disarray, it’s a certainty that Palin will surface again as a favored contender, but don’t expect her to act much smarter than she does now; Palin’s dumbness is like a blood stain on a white shirt – damn near impossible to eradicate.
And so on and so on into the dog days of summer.
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