Doom 'n gloom

This is a pitifully small blog. I don’t reach nearly as many people as I’d like to; on the other hand, my bloviating may not be worthy of a larger readership. Few people read what I write; fewer still take me seriously.

I am in mind of the legend of a hypochondriac. For those of you who don’t know the meaning of the word, it’s someone who’s not as ill as they think they are. For everyone else, I apologize for insulting your intelligence.

It may be apocryphal, but allegedly on the tombstone of this hypochondriac, there was the inscription “I told you I was sick!”

For some years now, I have been making dire predictions about the future of America. After a while, I have begun to sound like a Looney Tune, even to myself. Maybe The World Trade Center fell on my head and knocked me senseless.

I don’t think that my predictions are an odds play, i.e. just because I keep saying something bad will happen, the odds will catch up, and something bad will happen. I don’t think anyone in America understands the temporal nature of the terrorists we face today. We have grown fat and sassy because the current Republican administration has bought us seven years of valuable time. John McCain—who still doesn’t get my vote—said something the other day about staying in Iraq for a hundred years, if that’s what it’ll take to make the war turn out in our favor.

John McCain won’t be here in a hundred years, and neither will I. The terrorists, however, will be, and they’ll wait a hundred years if they can reproduce the coup of bringing down the Twin Towers.

There is an odd theorem referred to as reductio ad Hitlerum. It’s pretty simple and straightforward: just because Adolph Hitler had an idea, is doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad one. The man had lots of bad ideas. Like a blind squirrel rooting for acorns, he may have occasionally stumbled onto something tasty and positive. No defense of Hitler here; my daddy fought his regime in War II. He was crazy enough to start a two-front war with nations that outnumbered him 10-to-1. On the other hand, John F. Kennedy didn’t show a lot of common sense when he shut down PT 109 in the midst of the Japanese fleet.

Kennedy was a hero. Hitler is the ultimate bad man. Both showed poor judgment. It’s a quantitative; Hitler killed a lot more people, and as we use it in a legal defense down South, “He needed killin’.” Dad certainly thought so.

I have to feed my terribly undernourished body. There is a shorter, edited version of this rant on ScrappleFace. One day, I’ll wake up, and like the cartoon character, I’ll he howling “I told ya so!”