Cornwallis At Yorktown
This blog thing is much harder to do when my kids are on vacation. The obvious reason is the distraction of having three children of various ages around me asking for/jumping off off/trying to talk each other into eating stuff all the time. Don't worry, I haven't abandoned my basic parental approach of Salutary Neglect; I still harbor the long-term goal of having them violently declare their independence from me, followed by a protracted and ruinously expensive war that will end in my total humiliation after the intervention of the French navy. Such is the cycle of the relationships between fathers and sons.

I want to ignore them--desperately, desperately--so I can knock this thing out, but it's the shrieking that makes it hard. They're boys, I know, but they're all under 10 still, so I'm dealing with a fair amount of shrieking on a regular basis. It's a hard thing to ignore. Part of it is an involuntary response to that sound. Then factor in my ultimate legal responsibility for their safety and it almost requires a response, if only for the look of it. Shrieking tends to get the neighbors' attention.

The situation presents its own set of particular problems--possibly Child Protective Services intervention not least of them--but the main problem for me as a blogger is the threat of being locked in a Bushian bubble.

I'm on total information lockdown. I get my news from having a spare minute here or there to peruse a newspaper, from the radio as I drive to and from taking my eldest two to school or from Maggie Trinh, the nice Vietnamese lady who does my cuticles for me. Not only can I not give you the latest in current events, but until my kids go back to school, the goings-on among the former Boat People in Garden Grove are off the table as well. Not like I went there particularly often, but it was nice at least to have the option.

But alas, not only am I completely out of the loop (is her son Danny still dating that awful white girl?!) but my cuticles are completely out of control. It's like my nail-beds are the borders of Germany as established by the Treaty of Versailles and my nails themselves are Poland, 1939. This aggression must not be allowed to stand.

The best I can do for you people is occasionally glance at the internet headlines before I rush this thing out between shrieks.

As I was doing that today, guess what picture got my attention?



Lawks. And it goes with this headline: Severely obese fastest-growing U.S. overweight group.

Yes yes, very serious, fat people in America. Not only is it a direct threat to their health with all kinds of spun-out ancillary impacts on health care in this country in general, but my God, the poor camera people, both still photographers and the TV ones who have to go out and film them all from the neck down. It just isn't right.

And then I read the caption from the picture itself: it's a Reuters picture of a person waiting for a flight at Heathrow, which last time I checked was in London. As in foreign.

What the fuck kind of discrimination is this? American fat people aren't even good enough to film in a totally humiliating, dehumanized manner to illustrate a point about our own culture? We're even outsourcing the pictographical representations of our own failure as a people now?

This is the slippery slope they warned us about when Dell started staffing their Tech Support from Mumbai. Americans can't even get a job as faceless lard-asses anymore. And by God, we practically invented faceless lard-assness. Or at least we perfected it on a grand scale.

We lost the steel makers, the car factories and now this.

I'm going back into the bubble. At least there I can have false hope, just like the president.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.2


Pops

Labels: balalaika

- posted by Pops @ 10:45 AM