Today is the first of May and in many countries, though not here, it's quite a shindig and a party. In the days of the Evil Empire, the first of May, or "May Day" was the cause for massive parades of military hardware as Fearless or Beloved Leaders stood on review platforms while endless waves of multiple missile launchers rolled past gray crowds cheering wildly for their machines of domination.
Life was easy and easier, we just didn't know it. We had a litmus test back then to be our friend: do you HATE communists with all your heart, and mind and soul? And when you answered 'yes' you were on your way to being the best friend our money could buy. Shah of Iran? Ferdinand Marcos? They hated communists. You can look it up. We hated 'em, too.
Thank goodness we won the Cold War. Turns out the Soviets and them commies weren't nearly all that and a bag of chips though, for seven plus decades it sure looked like it, didn't it? We went eyeball to eyeball with those guys and they blinked. Turns out they didn't know anything about making cars, TVs or livable housing.
Their men's suits looked like they were made from concrete and their ladies' clothes probably contributed to the negative birthrates across the Iron Curtain. When was the last time any of us read or said 'Iron Curtain'? Wow, but for forty years after World War II, that's all we said. Then those countries held a Going Out of Communism Sale and became capitalists, just like us. Well sort of.
Actually what seemed to have happened as part of the New World Order and the Happy Joyful Earth we thought would result from the end of the cold war was a lot of very warm wars. We no longer had armies of ignorance massed against one another but rather tiny, almost amoeba-like, organic fanatics who were content to fight for the most obscure of causes, and the more obscure the better.
Some of them are unthinking pawns in geopolitical games that had been rigged before they were born and whose outcomes they can neither control nor appreciate. We accidentally (actually not so much accidentally as unintentionally and uncaringly) created people who have nothing to live for, but as we have learned, people who have nothing to live for always have something to die for. And then they want you to die for it, too.
Memorial Day will be here soon and that means the Big Race in Indianapolis and don't forget the barbecues! Here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs and Sharpened Elbows, we're conspicuously consuming while our poor and disenfranchised drown in red ink and debt. And while the last election didn't fix anything according to some, maybe the next one will.
I'm just waiting to vote for whoever will promise me the blue from the sky. I'd like to see a candidate promise a chicken in every pot, screw that! A pheasant in every pot. Two cars in every garage. All of our kids on the honor roll and the solemn assurance I can eat anything I want and still lose ten pounds by next weekend's high school reunion.
And while I'm at it, make me taller, too. First one to do all that has my vote, but only until tomorrow because then I'll want to know 'whatcha gonna do with all that money?/Whatcha gonna do when that money's all gone?'
-bill kenny
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