COSMIC, COMEDY, REDEUX!!

This entry is from my partner in crime and Co host Dennis(The RED Menace)I liked it and its well thought out and here is;

...as it happens, i'm a really big fan of irony. In these trying times, if it were not for my sense of humor and the likes of an intelligent few who appeal to it (Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and the like), I would have put the working end of a shotgun in my mouth a long time ago.

So there's George, my nemesis, a man I have grown to loathe so deeply that its almost maddening, and he's standing in Jackson Square, originally slave square, where the afro-caribbean people were sold like chattle and where the rhythms and soul of gospel, jazz, the blues and eventually rock and roll and rap were born from the pain and toil of American slaves, and what's ole George talking about but the failures of the federal goverment and how the vestiges of the evil enterprise conspired with the soul destroying diseases of poverty and racism to leave thousands of our fellow citizens stranded for days in a swirling river of feces and death and industrial rot. And, though he smirks through the whole speech, I know that sadly my president would not get the irony of the situation.

I don't mean to imply that I find this situation humorous in the traditional sense, becuase I don't. The effects and the cost of Hurricane Katrina, like those of 9/11, will be reverberating for years and decades to come, and i'm talking in purely the human cost: the orphaned children, the unneccessary dead, the fractured homes and arms and minds that experienced for a few days what would become of these fine United States if the republic ever crumbled. Perhaps, even, not of what may be but of what will be.

This is more the laugh to keep yourself from crying kind of humor. The kind that leaves you a little queasy and maybe even a little disoriented. The kind of humor that reminds you that evolution isn't a theory, its a fact, that the forces of natural selection conspire against us all and that, as the poet said, none of us get out of this life alive. My buddhist side reminds me that to laugh in the face of death is the greatest of human achivements, and we face death, both as individuals and as a nation, every day.

God, if there is such a beast, mocks us in our political and philosophical constructions, our laws and our culture and our laughter. In the grand scale of time humanity is scarecly a flicker and even our most enduring institutions and traditions are little more than a quantum fluctuation in the ever expanding void. I suppose the true believers still think the old man is gonna come back to us in a cloud, catch us up, and take us home to glory, but somehow the irony of a national day of prayer that contained a lot of requests and not a lot of penance leaves me howling uncontrolably with laughter on the floor. Please fix our broken highways and reconnect our oil pipelines and rebuild our mansions and our slums, but please ignore the blatant and revolting and enduring racial bigotry that turned this manageable tragedy into a human catastrophe. If that doesn't make you laugh then you should start Prozac treatment immediately.

If there is a God maybe we should see this, much the same way we should regard 9/11, which is to see it as a simple tatse of come-upance offered to us by a creator angry that the blessings of liberty he bore to the world through the American revolution have been sold at the altar of commodification and corporate capitalism and are now held in a not very public trust by an elite few who wield total power without regard to human dignity, soverignty, or worth. Are you laughing yet?

All that happened on 9/11 and in the aftermath of Katrina was the realization that America has joined the rest of the world. The bubble of passive isolation that once surrounded us is gone and we face the same threats and dangers, plagues and famines, wars and disasters as the rest of the world. In this I agree that God did truly ordain George W. Bush as president with a specific mandate, namely, to inflict on America what America itself has inflicted on the rest of the world. The storms come and we do nothing. The levees break and we do nothing. The people begin and we do nothing. The petroleum industry rapes billions of dollars of profit per quarter from all of us and we do nothing. Unions are busted before our eyes and we do nothing. Schools turn out anti-scientific and anti-intellectual students ill-equipped to life in the information age and we do nothing. The bills of our extravagant and wasteful lifestyles begin to come do and we do nothing. For no other sin than our own complacency is George Bush truly the right man for his times. I think I heard a chuckle out there. Can I get an Amen?

It is long past cliche to say that we are at a pivotal point in our history, and in the greater history of that of the human race, though the cynic in me says the pivotal moment was years ago and we've already passed the point of no return. President Bush, reading from his large-print speech at the United Nations security council, his personal madman shitzu Bolten at his side, trying to look the other major leaders of the free world in the eye and preach to them about our responsibilities and obligations to one another as fellow citizens of the world might have been the most laughable howler of the week, rivaled only by a triple threat of less mentioned stories: first, that someone at the Pentagon was ordered to destroy all the documents realting to Army intelligence operation Able Danger which identified Mahammad Atta as a terrorist two years before 9/11, second, the escape from a New Jersey laboratory of two mice infected with the plague, and third, that none other than Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove will lead the administration's post Katrina effort. Funny, ain't it?

There, I knew I could get a laugh out of ya.