Just another tricky day

I'm looking at the back cover of my final issue of Rolling Stone magazine and Elvis Costello is endorsing Visa cards......Talk about "they're selling postcards of the hanging."
Suspect we'll be cutting a deal for Dylan and Platinum Mastercard any day now.
"Wherever your boot heels may wander....Mastercard."

Yoko Ono leasing the likeness of John Lennon for American Express:
"Imagine you've no billfold/And no spending green
No way to pay for dinner/or the snacks in between.
Imagine empty wallets....It's enough to make you cry
But with our branded plastic/You can always buy..."

Meanwhile, we can accept things in the abstract that in the reality of here and now wouldn't work. I watch it happen here in Norwich all the time. Everyone wants to see his/her property taxes lowered, but no one wants "the character of their neighborhood to be destroyed" or "allow a commercial overlay zone to create an opportunity" to build a Starbucks next to our houses (pick one or sometimes, more than one).
We agree someone should take one for the team--YOU go first.

We all want to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.

We've bought in on a mantra that "government is nothing more than a rapacious appetite combined with an over active alimentary canal" (Thanks,Great Communicator!).
We want our taxes to go down but we want everything we have and we also want it to cost less and work better and don't tell us it cannot be done, or we will not vote for you. Ever.

At the national level we've invested billions to build armed forces that are brilliant in fighting conventional militaries (the Iraq army evaporated under staggering body blows within days of the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom), but there are no conventional militarys left.

Now we know how the British Empire felt squaring off against farmers hiding behind rocks at Concord and Lexington. We think of Ethan Allen not only as a great furniture retailer but as a
Green Mountain boy--suspect the Brits used the words traitor and brigand.

And the shifting of the "world order" has been complicated by our lack of agility in reordering our priorities. In a decade's time, if we're not careful (and we're not), we'll spend all of our money on social security, healthcare, armament and debt service. There's just no money for anything else.
Schools? Do our children look like they have a sense of history now?
Take a look at the text messages they send you on your phone--not exactly English and if Mickey D's didn't have pictures of the menu items on the cash register, they'd have no idea how to make change for a dollar....

Infrastructure? We don't need no stinking infrastructure! Sure the roads have potholes, the sewer system is antiquated and don't even think about power lines through my backyard (oh that's okay, I don't live in Fairfield County where such needs are great but possibilities remote).

The last thing the USA needed as we entered the 21st Century was a Global War On Terrorism-we cannot afford it and we cannot afford to NOT have it. I smile (actually grimace) when I read about concerns voiced by many well-meaning people on the money 'spent on the GWOT we could use elsewhere'. What did Albert Einstein say about matter being neither created or destroyed? (He never saw Pimp My Ride, I guess.)

And that's where the abstract meets the real...we can pretend that money would have gone into pick something, or more than one something, makes no difference "if not for the GWOT", but we wouldn't have done it. Last year's candidate for a CT Senate seat always talked about what we could be buying in the USA with the billion dollars a day we were spending in Iraq, as if that might have ever happened....

Americans bought in on James Turner's Manifest Destiny, but we've stopped reading it--good thing, since it looks like someone's putting the chairs on the table and turning on the houselights. What'd the bartender just say? Something about you don't have to go home, but you do have to go. Where is Joseph Heller and Yossarian now at Closing Time?

Almost works, except I fear we've lost our way.
"We came on a ship they called the Mayflower/We came on a ship that touched the moon. We came in the age's most uncertain hour and we sing an American tune."

Maybe we can get Paul Simon a gas card endorsement. Heck, people are still gonna drive, right?
-bill kenny