SYMBOLIC GESTURES & POSTURING OR CONGRESSIONAL & MEDIA TERRORISM?

SYMBOLIC GESTURES & POSTURING OR CONGRESSIONAL & MEDIA TERRORISM?

Ask the American public what they think of what President Obama calls, “Symbolic Gestures and Posturing” that Congress is throwing at us. This is no longer typical political bantering.

Our leaders are not taking serious the threats they are barking at the public when they step up to the microphone and hurl lies and gross exaggerations about their opponents. They ban together in their partisan hostility with not one rational voice ready to compromise.

Because the Republicans will do or say anything  to bring down this president, they are blinded by this goal while America sinks helplessly into this debt crisis.

They want us to live in that frightening abyss so they can take over the White House in 2012.   Alarmingly, with no one ready, willing, or qualified to run, will the Grand Old Party have to throw a Michele Bachman in to rule over our fractured country and the flailing financial crises.  Or will it be whoever wins the fickle popularity polls to become the succeeding leader of the free world.

If the GOP had a list of qualified, intelligent, stable, believable candidates in the wings ready and capable of taking over the country, we could at least feel some assurance that we are not in the hands of belligerent imbeciles.

Make no mistake – this visionless scenario is as frightening as the debt crisis. The blind arrogance of this Congress is carelesslly terrifying the elderly, the poor and infirmed.

So what is the Recovery bottom line here?   Jobs, jobs, jobs.  Congress and the voracious media are hel bent on scaring the wits out of us with a form of medoa terrorism bordering on national collapse. Who can expand their business, hire more workers, buy more materials when they are being told incessantly that the world is coming to an end, the world market is collapsing, or at least, that American is ALREADY down the drain. Expand the economy? Who will shop, buy a new car, a home, with the manufactured threat of depression hanging over their heads?

Are we then expected to go back to our lives after the voracious carnage has ceased and the best liar has won? No!  We have no control whatsoever over our future that is now in the hands of children completely unaware that the storm is upon us.  Time to stop the game playing. Lightning is about to strike and these ‘kids’ don’t know enough to get in out of the rain of destruction.

Banish the media from Congress, take away their mikes, take away their lunch, send them to their rooms and tell them not to come out until they can behave.

Citizens, you can tell them we no longer trust them to protect us. Use the ever present Social Media, email, or 800 numbers to let them know.

See also my essay; “It’s Okay To Feel Paranoid. They Really Out To Get You” http://bit.ly/nJZSwu.

If we speak up, we can make a difference.

Patricia Moloney Dugas

Ghostwriter Wanna be – The Movie…

The Ghost Writer movie is leaving town. It is ending this week, so I drop what I am doing and race down to the theatre. I want to be a full fledged ghostwriter myself, so this film is a must-see. Hopefully, I can learn from this much-acclaimed movie how a real ghoster operates. If I pay close attention, I might end up getting hired by some major celebrity to pen their life’s story. This guy in the movie was offered $250,000! I could live with that!

Being in the Camelot Theatre that also has a lounge, I ordered a gin and tonic to take to my seat. There I sat, sipping my cocktail with pen in hand, ready to scribble in the dark, the details, demeanors, and demographics of this writer on the job. Remember the movie Sunset Boulivard where Gloria Swanson addresses “all those wonderful people out there in the dark.” That’s what I was feeling until the curtain went up.

Now to the movie. With Roman Polanski’s flair for bleakness, our rather naive ghostwriter is spirited off in the middle of the night to an isolated island off the New England coast where he is to interview his subject, the former prime minister of Britain! Pierce Brosnan! I dream of getting a client as handsome and sophisticated as he with such a glamorous life story.

As our hero is settling in, he finds out that the previous ghostwriter died the week before! He supposedly got drunk, met with an ‘accident’, and his body washed up on this lonely New England beach. Well okay, writers can get overly emotional. I myself would have more reserve.

The next day in the village, our ghoster is mugged! Thugs stole a manuscript he was given to deliver. As the story gains momentum, I remind myself to first try a client that leads a simpler life. Maybe one who lives in a beautiful mansion instead of the cement bunker Polanski provides our Prime Minister, his body guards, a scary wife, and a stand-off, suspicious staff.

As our friend finally gets to interview the Minister, the television interrupts with blaring reports that our subject PM is accused of being involved in war crimes! Well, that is another story indeed! This ends up with guns and body guards fending off wild anarchists calling for his head while pounding on his car.

By now, I am gulping the gin and tonic I brought to my seat.

Our ghost’s personal life begins to unravel while that of the PM heats up. Well I wasn’t expecting that! I was eagerly scribbling helpful notes in the dark, but never considered this turn of events! If I myself should hook up with a similar client, would I end up being embroiled in this sort of escapade? Would I have to dodge bullets for $250K?
Events darken as the plot thickens.

Since our beer and sandwich ghost is rather handsome in a naive sort of way, he is surreptitiously seduced by the PM’s mysterious and scary wife. Well now. Ghosts have normal feelings but certainly are expected to remain dispassionate. They should have no personality – they are only ghosts – non-entities in the lives of their clients! I assume that ghosters just ask questions – take notes – and type. Not consort with their client’s entourage.

Meanwhile, back at the bunker, he is analyzing the dead ghost’s unfinished manuscript in the very room that man stayed in. His belongings are still there! Creepy. The hidden clues he stumbles on makes him realize that his own life may be in danger. Was this why the guy washed up on the beach miles from the accident?

Armored CIA operatives are now on to our friend, so he escapes by leaping off the ferry as it leaves the island’s port! Yipes! “Polanski has churned up a splendidly palpable sense of dread off the shores of Cape Cod,” says a reviewer of this film. “Oscar performances,” especially by the icy wife – while in bed with our hero? Well that’s just fine. What literary recommenda-tions has he given me on the ins and outs of ghosting procedures with a perfect stranger…

The murder and mayhem that follows I cannot divulge here in case you haven’t seen this superb film, but the brilliant Polanski provides an ending that is a stunner.
As for me, I know I can do this biography stuff. My own qualifications are impressive. I have been a technical writer at a major university, a webmaster, and an editor. Plus, I am in a Critique Group. I‘ve learned to interpret their stuff with a Bostonian level of literary sophistication, adding my own sense of drama with succincticality. I can add life and spice to the most mundane. Perfect for ghosting with clients who need their ordinary lives perked up.

I did purchase Sarah Palin’s ridiculously successful biography because you had to know she hired a humdinger ghostwriter. Not much there to glean from, though. I’m short on “golly gee-whiz gotcha’s.” Maybe I should check out Winston Churchill’s hallowed memoirs instead.
Patricia Moloney Dugas

IS BREVITY TRULY THE SOUL OF WIT - Or Twittered Tidbits of the Witless?

Is brevity truly the soul of wit — or twittered tidbits of the witless?

Exeunt preponderance and perspicacity. Enter brevity, abbreviation, and
bombast!

With 140 to play with in Twitterland, there is no time/space to dawdle
with depth and dimension.

As we stumble over truncated Tweet codes, we sense the tension of
half-thought thoughts. These dictums, once struck, can never be retrieved.

140 meager, incomplete characters have been sent off into the literary abyss. Our souls entailed. Will we ever again have time to ruminate, recollect, or reminisce?  

Must we wade through lists of gobbledies hoping for a glimpse of a 140-penned profundity?

Alas that it should come to this…. A world of tweeny, teeny, twitters…

Patricia Moloney Dugas

THE WORLD IS WATCHING CONGRESS

Charles Dickens In Washington:  In a Dickensian atmosphere, 311,684,000 Americans are standing outside the walls of Congress, a hand extended, waiting.  Are they looking for charity? A handout? A crust of bread? Another bowl of porridge?

NO!  They are waiting for those in there to make something happen - now.  They want what their taxes have already paid for.

As The World Watches:  And what are those politicians doing inside the hallowed halls of Congress?  Playing cards!  Or Ping Pong!  While the country is combusting, these noble leaders sworn to protect us, are bouncing the ball back and forth, playing Chicken! They are alarmingly unaware that the world is watching with dismay, their “childish” game playing. They see the leaders of the free world holding the financial stability of the global markets in their hands. They, along with the 311 million outside, are dumfounded at the blind chaos they have created. When the card game is over with no winner, some kind of deal will be struck – before the deadline?

The Overriding Evil:  The GOP is determined to bring down the president no matter what happens to the smoldering government. Off to Hades with the 311 million. Evil is a harsh word to use, but deliberately terrorizing your constituents is itself an evil.

“Are there no Workhouses”:  While they duel, they tell them to get lost!  They are already lost. With their game of Chicken, they unashamedly threaten the elderly, the poor and infirmed, the unemployed; they will cut off Medicare and Medicaid, stop Social Security checks, cut social benefits, etc., until somebody blinks. Besides, they have wars to wage, countries to invade.

The Town Criers: The complicit media, like vultures on a fencepost, wait to scrape up the tattered carcass and continue to play their own games of gottcha reporting. Hang the sensitivity of frightened citizens. They will assure us that we just barely escaped destruction at the hands of Congress. But be wary, it may happen again. Stay tuned.

Dickensian Abandonment:  Never before has the American public felt so abandoned by their government – the public display of impotence from these politicians further serves to increase the despair. Are they willing to risk social unrest to further destroy our trust?

“Please Sir, I Want Another Bowl of Gruel.” Go stand in the rain! They are already outside, standing in the rain.

Patricia Moloney Dugas

Feel free to use this article to let them know how you feel.  Use the social media to send this to them. http://bit.ly/royceN

IT’S OKAY TO FEEL PARANOID – They Really Are Out to Get You

If you don’t feel threatened, you should. Your purse, your car, your home, your identity, and even your sanity are all continually, unreasonably at risk. Our children are grabbed off the streets in broad daylight. Young women disappear with alarming frequency only to be found murdered.  Carjacking, home invasion, elder crime permeate our newspapers, local news, and interminable TV news blasts. We are no longer safe - on our streets, in our cars, or even sitting in our homes.

Lack of Humanity: The devastating level of cold-blooded crime leaves us in constant fear of being robbed, violated, or killed. The level of cruelty used in these assaults intensifies our fear. 

Fear Everyone Now:  We are not at risk from foreign terrorist attacks, but victims of random, violent attacks by our own citizens, our very neighbors! We are learning to fear everyone. Don’t help those in distress – they may be criminals in disguise.

Our Human Rights:  Our government marches around the world demanding global human rights, yet American women can no longer go out after dark, use ATM’s, travel alone, and are told never to open their perpetually locked doors. If they do any of these activities, whatever happens - it is implied, is their own fault.

What Homeland Security?  Billions we spend as a nation on Homeland Security against foreign terrorism.  But while we monitor others around the world, we at home are swallowed up in crime at every level. Our security is replaced by a barrage of commercials by an over-zealous media on crime prevention, telling us to protect ourselves by paying for security alarms, identity protection, credit card alerts, et al, again emphasizing our vulnerability.

Perpetual Bad News:  We used to go to bed at night and watch the local news for the weather, but now, we are lambasted with one crime after another – national then local crime; the very store we shopped at that day, a fast food shoot-out, drive-by shootings, crime busts, Amber alerts, and on and on. We must wade through the danger we escaped in our neighborhood – just to get the weather.

Armed and Dangerous:  Thanks to an otherwise intended article in the constitution, there is now bizarre free access to all sorts of guns, assault weapons, and ammunition. Forget a militia against the British, these weapons are intended for street warfare, robbery, and defense against other gangsters.  Crime shows and movies are instructional battlegrounds. The few criminals that are arrested and convicted, often repeat-offenders, are sentenced off to crime school – our bourgeoning prison system. While our dedicated law enforcement risk their lives to stop crime, those arrested are often back out on the streets. We have more people imprisoned that all other countries combined.

Irresponsible Immigration:  We threw open the doors to all immigration with the blindness of a drunken sailor on a binge.  Come on in and join the prosperity party. Word got around; the criminal element of other countries packed their bags, got a card or student visa, or slipped in over the border.  They are free to move in, join their cohorts, set up criminal strongholds, and disappear into the fabric of what was America. They know full well the laxity of our justice system.  Their criminal resolve far exceeds the complacency of our citizens, and the government’s preoccupation with foreign dangers.

Status Quo or No?   With Social Networking so readily available to almost everyone, we are now able to contact every source of government and the media to express our fears. Facebook, Twitter or blogs, we can take a stand against the loss of our freedom.

Please feel free to copy this article and send it around.

 http://thesocietaltamperer.blogspot.com/2011/07/its-okay-to-feel-paranoid-they-really_07.html

Patricia Moloney Dugas

IS BREVITY THE SOUL OF WIT or the Death of Depth?

Is brevity truly the soul of wit? -- or twittered tidbits of the witless?

Exeunt preponderance and perspicacity. Enter brevity, abbreviation, and bombast!  

With 140 to play with in Twitterland, there is no time/space to dawdle with depth and dimension.

As we stumble over truncated Tweet codes, we sense the tension of half-thought thoughts. These dictums, once struck, can never be retrieved. 140 meager, incomplete characters have been sent off into the literary abyss. Our souls entailed.

Will we ever again have time to ruminate, recollect, or reminisce? Must we wade through lists of gobbledies hoping for a glimpse of a 140-penned profundity?

Alas that it should come to this….  A world of tweeny, teeny, twitters…

Patricia Moloney Dugas

Hey Scruffy – I’ve Got Bad News!

To all you men now growing scruff on your faces – I’ve got bad news. 

Are you thinking you now look mature, mysterious, sophisticated, even alluringly primitive?

NO!  You just look scruffy, mangy, unkept, down-at-the-heel, unemployed!   Guys, look in that mirror you don’t use any more -- it ain’t pretty. First tattoos, and now this?

Do you sorta look like George Clooney?

 NO!  You look like Brett Favre – out of grace and out of a job!  Maybe even like an unshaven reprobate like doctor House!   (… advanced apologies to the really unemployed…)

Will you grow into a silvery Sean Connery?  NO!  You’d need his British accent, his blue eyes, silver tongue, and savoir faire.

Instead, you look like the destitute hanging around the 7-11 with scruff and spikey bed hair.

Do girls want to kiss you?  NO!  Scratchy, scruffy, speckely, peppery.  But what is women’s real anxiety?  If you no longer bother to shave, well, maybe you -- uh -- don’t bother to bath?

Women have not yet come to grips with tattoos. But take heart, girls, at least when their rationality returns, they can at least shave of their stubble to take back their real identity.

Why is this happening, guys?  Is it an Armageddon preoccupation?  You know May 21^st, 2011 has passed and you’re still here -- unshaven -- but 12/21/2012, the Mayan doomsday, still looms out there.  Will you not shave until 12/22/2012?  Women will just have to stay around and wait…

The Jangled Star Spangled

It has been a good thing to start sporting events with the singing of the Star Spangled Banner. It is restorative to all - who stand together, with flags and honor guards - saluting the United States of America.

For that very reason, I bring attention to the growing abuse of this, our National Anthem. The choice of celeb’s seems to have precipitated a competition as to who can out-jazz the others. Some of their modernized renditions border on the irreverent if not sacrilegious. Francis Scott Key would never recognize these varied vibratos being bellowed through half-swallowed microphones – often off-Key, so to speak.

The crowd is already primed for pugilism – with libations, team spirit, and comradely. The solemnity of the moment is lost – often interrupted by the howling of the crowd during the final stanzas. - as much as to say, “Let’s get on with the game!”

I am not recommending that we do away with The National Anthem, but let’s substitute “God Bless America” for sporting events instead. There can be a ‘star’ leading the song, but we can all join in the singing, and the idea of asking “God” to bless all of us together seems rather nice.

Let’s leave the Anthem for solemn occasions; the Olympics, presidential, funereal, and military state of affairs. It was never intended for football.

Patricia Moloney Dugas

POLITICAL GRADATIONS: A Scale for Voters

Now that the 2010 mid-term elections are over, it seems we were forced to make hold-your-nose choices between some of the candidates. Who are these people? Supposed statesmen committing these crimes while giving their pledge to honor and serve, we the people. They stand now before Congress smeared with the stains of seditious campaign warfare – tattered and torn.

How did they arrive so tarnished at the doorstep of democracy?

We found ourselves hoping the election would end quickly before more sleaze, er.., “side issues” surfaced. The media continuously broadcast these slanderous insinuations bordering on libel: “to publish in print (including pictures), writing or broadcast through radio, television or film, an untruth about another which will do harm to that person or his/her reputation, by tending to bring the target into ridicule, hatred, scorn or contempt of others.” Was this our election?

Could we, the voters, disqualify them should the allegations grow too gross? Should we change the ballot to enable us to vote them out before they’re voted in? I am suggesting we set up a grading chart of all the personal and professional flaws we are asked to turn a blind eye to if we are to continue having a viable government. Grading these issues:

Dalliances:
Enticement of an underage page. A careless slip?
An affair with a staffer. A brief dalliance?
Denial of the ensuing children.
New! Witchcraft or Warlockery.

Criminal Behavior:
Slanderous campaign practices. “Just part of the game…?”
Employment of illegal aliens to do chores. “Never suspected…”
Salacious texting, emailing dirty pictures. Oh, just funny stuff?
DUI with death or dismemberment?

Federal offenses:
Blatant racial, religious, or gender bigotry.
Tax evasion. A federal offense - or bookkeeping oversight?
Espionage! Consorting with whomever is out to get us.

These former “career-ending indiscretions” are becoming no more than amusing fodder for the hour after hour television lead-ins. We can only sigh and wait for the next televised revelation to feed our pruriosity. Has this become the norm for all elections henceforth? Did The Sixties infiltrate and dissolve the public criteria for governance? Are they now in competition with the NFL?

Out the door no more: before, there were tearful apologies, with spouse beside them, followed by forced retirement from their political ride. Away, away, ignoble knave! Darken no more the doorsteps of this, our fair Democracy!

But wait! Could this have been nothing more than a cover-up -- a Conspiracy of Ignorance? While the mud and allegations fling, we never do hear our politician’s resolutions for the desperate issues crippling our nation. Is this a clever smoke screen to lull us with vicarious lasciviousness that will titillate our senses, then melt away once these villains are ensconced in the very chambers of Congress?

They really have no idea how to put that “Chicken in Every Pot.” Jobs - or not. Climate - hot or not. Nukes or a war plot…

Who shall we enlist to delineate the political gradations of moral conduct? We need “tall men, sun crowned, who live above the fog,” wrote Josiah Gilbert Holland in the 1880’s. Find someone who is able to solemnly judge the moral and professional significance of these transgressions. Let him who is without…er, mistakes…?

A “New Morality” is sweeping the nation via the media – a redefining of moral and criminal behavior. See my commentary "We All Make Mistakes - Enter the New Morality” on my “Societal Tamperer” blog,
www-thesocietaltamperer.blogspot.com. "We All Make Mistakes” - Enter the New Morality

Since we all make mistakes, who is ever guilty of anything?

"Hamlet" With a Galactic Edge" - My Review of PBS's contemporary Hamlet

“Hamlet” With a Galactic Edge
by Patricia Moloney Dugas

In the royal bedchamber, the Royal Dane leapt upon the bed of his confounded mother, queen Gertrude, and with hair flung wild, jaw clenched tight, and eyes bulged wide, he harassed her, howled at her, shook her writhing body, and, wrenching her garments, threatened her very existence. Not a Great Dane leaping, but Hamlet, the Royal Prince of Denmark. This was a scene from PBS’s contemporary television adaptation of Shakespeare’s wondrous tragedy, “Hamlet”.

With blood running cold, poor Hamlet had just slain the intrusive, meddlesome Polonius who hid himself behind an arras to keep watch on them. Alarmed, Hamlet ran him through as he rustled there. It seems this meddler’s daughter Ophelia has gone quite mad because this Royal Dane, her once professed lover, who, in his own madness, has rejected her, and snarling, commands her off to a nunnery. Thus she is set adrift. (Oh, sorry about that careless remark…)

Our new-age personification of the prince did not brood, nor lay upon his bed steeped in unmanly grief. Instead, this thespian youth in a rumpled tuxedo, howled and gamboled like a deranged primate, from bed to floor then back again, eyes bugging out of his fiery, half-crazed royal countenance. The queen is left sobbing in fear and disbelief.

Nay, nay, poor Hamlet. She is thy royal mum. Do not reproach her harshly. So what if she married your royal uncle who murdered your royal dad, the queen’s noble, sun-crowned husband king, then wedded and bedded this murderous beast, this mildew’d ear, and left you, her princely babe, beside yourself in woesome, lonesome grief. Oh, what noble woe.

While this modern, fiery, bug-eyed Hamlet lept and wailed ‘gainst his queenly mum, I thought I could hear the once knighted Sir Lawrence Olivier, a former princely player now resting in his solitary grave, flipping asunder and mournfully lamenting; “Oh, that the too, too solid flesh of this clown would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew. Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst thespian slaughter. That it should come to this...

That ‘Doctor Who’ has lept from the BBC to the PBS queen’s incestuous sheets!”

Who, you say, is ‘Doctor Who’? Why ‘tis BBC’s David Tennant who was recruited away from his inter-galactic personification of ‘Dr. Who’ and turned into our Royal Dane. As ‘Dr. Who’, he learned to wild his hair, flare his nostrils, and widen his eyes to face the onslaught of inter-galactic alien hoards.
Then, who called in Captain Picard from Star Trek’s inter-planetary adventures to play the dastardly uncle/king? How didst this doublet of sc-fi knaves happen to Elsinore? While the captain, Patrick Stewart portrayed Claudius most admirably with tone and temperament in splendid Elizabethan manner, there was an overplay gone amiss. Who gave the Royal Shakespeare Company sanction to re-define the Royal Bard’s pensive, brooding, medieval wimp, Hamlet? Hmm? Was this new Hamlet’s fearsome bluster needed to present a fresher, more frantic, fearsome face with widened eyes, gaunted cheeks, and smoldering fire in his youthful belly? Was this royal revision to be sustenance for the frenzied appetite of uptight Avatarian theatre today? Pray it is not so.

Note the curious costuming deviations as things grow dark. From formal dress to jacketless tuxedos with prominent unleashed black bowties carefully askew! Like a dance team on break? A message I failed to grasp here. I did miss legendary tunics and trappings, velvet capes, feathered caps, crossbows, swords and helmets. (If they kept the words and phrases faithful, why not the trappings as well?)

Most confounding, this comely Hamlet appears, (oh literary gasp!), in a red, labeled tee-shirt and jeans in the weighty scene where he confronts Ophelia to admonish her, decrying he never loved her! Tuxedos and t-shirts while the kingdom is rent asunder? Oh, doubly, double woe.

Horatio in corduroy! And this I could not bear; Ophelia in Capri pants and ponytail! How darest they speak the sacred texts mockingly in garb as befits the urchins of the streets? What a falling out there has been. Didst the noble Bard also tossle in his eternal slumber?

Indeed, all this did deeply grieve my heart, mine eye and ear, jarring my classic literary nerve. Alas it cannot come to good, but break my heart, for must I hold my tongue?

Hell no!
This leaping and growling far o’r ran the delicacy of the bard’s intended verse. Our adolescent offender has spent too much time bounding about in his British medium, the red phone booth, to suitably express the oral delicacies of our royal Dane’s lamentations, torments and travails.

Send him packing, I say! Call up a gentler player more fit to companion the approbations of Picard’s lecherous Claudius and ghostly apparition. I swear…
Shuffle off your mortal coil, alien intruder.

Laertes, you served us well. You slay him down – silencing his rabid provocations.

Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I am avenged. This prancing plebeian prince is dead. Pat Dugas

The Media Fright Show: Its Gotta Be a Video Game

Is the media’s exploitation of poisonous politics, economical malaise, joblessness, crime, Middle East invasions, global warming, and botulistic epidemics a carefully scripted alarmist docudrama? Well, either TV news is a video game gone amuck, or we have turned the media controls over to the fools among us. Angry, vengeful, out-of-control fools. We have given them permission to wreak havoc on the American mind. And we fall for it. We shiver in our boots at the prospect that any one of these disasters could destroy us.

This has got to be just a TV videogame, egged on by those self-aggrandizing radio bombasts sitting safely in their studios. Without questioning their motives, we sit there and let them convince us that the sky indeed is falling and we had better tune in at 11:00pm for the life-saving details. They have us addicted to their calamities.

The source of their venom is the politicians, preachers, and prognosticators that will fabricate anything to decimate their political, social, or media rivals. They have raised the level of abuse to unprecedented intensity, bordering on the libelous. All manner of propriety is abandoned. The proliferation of media outlets, blogs, Twitter, et al., only serve to escalate the competition.

As I watch these day-long tragedians presenting their litanies of disasters, posing as trustworthy news commentators, it dawns on me that this must be a Media Gotcha Game. Then it all makes sense! Certainly no rational, conscionable politician, TV commentator, or witless radio wizard would possibly use their craft to wantonly disassemble the psyche of the nation.

Most media claim the Dem’s are failing disastrously, imperiling our existence as a free nation - even. This opens the door for the ousted, still-stinging GOP to leap into the fray and bring forth their most ‘honorable’ men to seize the day. The door is wide open. To our horror, they choose instead to let the voices of those aforementioned rabid fools still speak for them. Incessantly – without intervention. I find this far more disturbing than all the existing swamp gas swirling around us.

Who will step in to save all of us from ourselves? To use one of their abused phrases, “Wake up, America.” This is not a video game. These are real news organizations gambling with our souls simply to out-disaster and out-publish each other.

My personal solution to this media mêlée is to switch to ESPN and NFL football. There is carnage I can witness - live - then decide for myself if it was a clean hit or an illegal strangle-hold – like the TV and radio news. Then again, the NFL has sold its soul as well. They have given the game over to 375 pound low-budget behemoths who are trained to destroy very expensive 250 pound QBs, RBs, and WRs, thus decimating the game. Another scripted gotcha game? Don’t get me started on that issue…
Stay tuned. Pat Dugas

Dampen Down The Damsel’s Decibels In Tennis

Dampen Down The Damsel’s Decibels In Tennis

Like so many other societal failings these days, the WTA, for whatever ungodly reason, has allowed the Women’s Tennis Tour to become a hootin’, howlin’, cat fight. While this screech-fest is going on, the fans, locked in their seats, are committed to absolute silence. Heaven forbid a child should cut loose - they would be forced to remove the annoyance post haste.
Because the WTA has not had the chutzpah to step in and regulate this decibel debacle, we, the tennis devotees, are instead subjected to an unparalleled symphony of who-gotcha howling. Since it is deliberately orchestrated, it becomes necessary for the ladies to develop their own unique shriek – something with a ring to it – maybe a double yowl to cover up the tell-tale sound of the ball leaving their strings that might signal the type of shot. If they should flub the screech, is that like a blink in poker?
These damsels, appearing in teeny tiny tennis tutus, belie the ferocity that burns in their barely covered bosoms and bottoms to smash, crash, and annihilate the little yellow fuzzies. Now that this piquing contest has been allowed to escalate, some have added double crescendos to their repertoire, i.e., Hantekova of Russia with her Hey-yah! Where do they practice their hoots? Do they have a howl coach?
I openly confess to having prayed for a bout of incurable laryngitis to hit the locker-rooms. Nothing life threatening, just painful – like our ears. As I remember, Navratilova, Stephi, and Davenport, had no need to bellow. They just won all those titles by focusing on strokes – not shrieks.
As Sharipova’s career diminishes, her screech escalates. Protect your eardrums when her game goes to hell in a ball basket. Her freneticism is scary! I find myself relieved when she loses – taking her designer tutu, haughty expression, her pony tail and puppy back to the airport. Sad commentary actually. Not like watching basketball where you can lower the TV and turn on the radio to hear the game. Don’t get me started on basketball! Might we ever use clackers, horns, and whistles at tennis matches? We should have the right to express ourselves.
Grunting has spread to the ATP men’s tour now but at least those few who do grunt don’t rattle my nerve endings. More of a mellow bellow.
Bottom line here. I play, watch, tape and DVR, photograph, and attend everything. I even pay big bucks for the Tennis Channel. In the 70’s, I was a paper cup away from Arthur Ashe at the U.S. Open at Longwood Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. He would never dream of grunting, even if he fell over the ball boys. Oh, such class! I even saw a curly haired kid named McEnroe at 18 beat up someone on a hot Wednesday afternoon with nary a gasp.
I myself play with a Wilson Carbon Hyper-Hammer wide-body with enough power to punch a hole in the green court screens. I started with a small wooden Slazenger bought from my Aussie tennis coach. My elevation to the Hyper-Hammer is testament to my continued involvement in the game. Having lived through the modernization of this grand ol’ lawn game, it is a joy to see the women’s game come alive with these super racquets. They have the power to intimidate, so they don’t need the sound effects. These racquets give them voice enough. Are we more likely to watch because the women have decided to screech? I don’t think so!
I no longer wake up at 2:00am here on the West Coast to watch women’s tennis LIVE from the European tourneys. With one eye open, I don’t want to listen to bellows of power emanating from my giant stereo TV system in the bedroom. Not in the middle of the night. I do waken to watch the men’s matches.
I don’t watch women’s tennis much anymore. Sad. They could have stopped it way back when Monica Seles started grunting. They did try to stop her, but backed down. Mustn’t offend the prima donnas. Tough luck for the fans.
The most we can hope for at this stage of the game is that the tennis associations will at least attempt to curb the annoyance. It may be too late to abolish something they have already allowed to permeate the game. Like gun control, illegal immigration, and grunting, by the time they legislate it, everyone will have amassed an arsenal – of guns, green cards, grunts, groans, and bellows.

Prescription for a Walking Somnambulation - my poem about drugging the elderly.

Prescription for a Walking Somnambulation

Remember Auntie B, now roaming
in her world of forgotten dreams.
Could not remember prayers and hymns.
Her memory’s gone awry, it seems.

Turns out the capsules in the kitchen
have stolen away her mind,
they paralyzed her thinking and
left somnambulating auntie behind.

Poor forgetful Auntie B was
ever so faithful to her piles of pills
believing all the while these potions
were needed to cure her ills.

A bottle of capsules to start the day,
a pill for this, and a pill for that.
A tonic to sooth the ills from pills.
Oh yes, a note to feed the cat.

But lo, one day, her nephew came
and seeing her vast apothecary,
called up the doc and like as not
he can’t see why she’s been so scatty!

He can write you out a dream or two.
to help you forget your tribulations.
Remind him then of Auntie B
and her prescribed somnambulations.


Doctors are giving every drug in their arsenal to the elderly - who can least afford them - and whose fragile bodies cannot handle all those chemicals. Keep track of your relatives. You may bring them back to life.

"We All Make Mistakes” - Enter the New Morality

A hulking, pro football player, after beating his girlfriend, said to the press, “I just made a mistake.” He did not admit he committed a violent crime punishable by law, an act grievous enough to send him to jail. He only admits he made a mistake. To compound his arrogance, he added with emphasis; “We ALL make mistakes.” The insidious implication here is that you and I must be equally guilty since we ALL make (these kinds of) mistakes. We most likely have done things equally as grievous.

NFL Quarterback Michael Vick, proven guilty of vicious crimes with his dog fighting business, exclaims in his long-awaited press interview, “We all make mistakes, I was immature.” He has not committed a serious crime - he just made a juvenile misjudgment - at 25. However immature he claimed to be, he went to prison and served time for his inexcusable immaturity.

Dan Patrick of Fox Sports who often interviews these criminals has picked up the slogan when he himself used it to explain his own misbehavior, “EVERYONE makes mistakes.”

Even the preachy moralist Bill O’Reilly, on Fox TV claimed, after he paid off a litigious female co-worker claiming sexual harassment, “We ALL do wrong things, all of us,” re-enforcing the new collective guilt. And now, politicians have adopted this new line of moral reasoning when caught perpetrating serious professional transgressions. These people are not the kids next door, but our political leaders, media commentators, athletes and roll models.

This is the alarming New Morality. By implication, we ALL have made serious mistakes ALL our lives, and continue to morally ‘slip up’. Is the only difference, those who get caught?

Look up the word mistake: a slip-up, a gaffe, an oversight, misstep, or momentary failure, according to Thesaurus. No indication of criminal behavior.
Now look up criminal: illegal, scandalous, unlawful, illicit, and immoral. Is there not a great gulf between the two?

Those who have led a good, morally-guided life - never harming anyone, never stealing, NEVER committing a serious crime, are very alarmed at this criminal prevalent disregard for the written law.

You may think this is a stretch, a meaningless exaggeration, but the prevalent use of this expression has serious moral implications. In our enlightened modern-day society, the media is telling us – no one is really guilty anymore.

SHAME ON REGGIE BUSH

The DAMAGE he has caused by his arrogance and greed will echo throughout USC (my other home) and College Football for years. He could have fixed it, but left USC hanging out to dry.

He never considered all the other innocent players and recruits that will suffer from his stupid, selfish actions.

SHAME ON YOU - REGGIE BUSH