AWFUL MOMENTS

I’ve essentially turned off my television for the next week.  The new Time Magazine showed up in my mailbox today with the all-too-familiar picture of a Dallas motorcade on the cover.  It will be everywhere for the next seven days.  There are two such searing events in the lives of most of us, three for those of our parents’ generation, and each is burned into us in such a way as to become part of who we are.  This post appears in both my personal and my political blogs because of this duality, a national experience personally shared and experienced.

I first began to feel old when a group of co-workers and I were exchanging reminiscences of where we were that November day when the news came, and a bright young thing piped up: “I hadn’t been born yet”.  And in my mind I thought: ‘really, it’s been that long?’  I do, of course, remember that day with some embarrassment since I made some smart-assed remark to the first kid to stick his head in the 10^th grade geometry class window to say: “the president’s been shot”.  In my defense, none of us could believe the news at first, but I, always quick with the least appropriate statement, said something like: “who, Lincoln?”

Anyway, I still cannot view that Dallas footage, and so I’m giving up TV for a week, just as I do for the week after Labor Day each year, and as our parents do around the first week of December.  I can’t even look at the weather channel since I’m sure they’re planning a special on why good weather led to Kennedy’s shooting.  Even one of my favorite escapist TV shows – Bones – did an episode on the assassination once.

One of the main reasons I can’t watch is that I can’t take the barrage of ‘experts’, each claiming they’ve proven some conspiracy theory: there were two assassins; Roosevelt knew the Japanese were coming; the CIA/mob/Cubans killed Kennedy; Bush and Condoleezza Rice knew what the hijackers were planning, and so on.  In my mind, these wild-eyed fame-chasers are just a subset of our polarized, screaming society, where tables are being pounded and spittle is flying on every channel, from all sides of the political spectrum, on TV or You-Tube, and each has a more horrible allegation regarding his opponent than the next.

So now, especially now, by all the Gods you profess to believe in, can you all please just SHUT UP!

ELEPHANT PUN

There has been a lot of fussing in the media over this week's Time Magazine cover, which shows NJ's overweight governor in silhouette with the caption "The Elephant in the Room".  Pundits are all exorcised over the fat joke, but I actually think it was inspired.  After all, the joke takes a particularly apt description of Christie's position in the party after his landslide win, and links it to his size, the Republican symbol, and his rough and tumble personality.  I've never seen a better cover that wasn't on the "New Yorker". 

And you know, we could do a lot worse than a President Christie.  He combines the conservative instincts of Reagan and the Bushes with the volatile temperament of Andrew Jackson and the size of William Howard Taft.  Saddle him with a Democratic Senate so that he'd have to deal, and we might actually get this country back on the move.

I can just imagine his first speech at the United Nations.

But, of course, our perverted primary system will do what it always does, and give us two pukes beholden to the extremes in the respective parties to choose between on election day.

Pfui!

THE ETERNAL MONEY GRUB

Take a guess how long it took for Cory Booker to start begging donations for his next campaign.

Go on, take a guess.

It was the very day he was elected in the special election!  In fact, his email stated that he had just gotten ". . . off the stage at our victory rally here in Newark, and before I go celebrate with family, friends, staff, volunteers, and other supporters who made this incredible night possible, I wanted to send you a quick note."

Now I do understand that it's only 14 months until that seat has to be run for again, but my Lord!  Show a modicum of decorum!  Even his opponent waited a week before trying to fill the hole in his campaign war-chest, and his need is much more immediate than Booker's, because he's seriously in debt having, according to him, been thrown under the bus by the Republican organization. 

I should explain that I was on both campaigns' email lists, so I could watch what they were saying about each other.  I've always believed that what you say about your opponent says a lot more about you than what you say about yourself.

Speaking about what politicians say, I do wish that local candidates who buy time on television would be more precise in identifying what they're running for.  Most of us don't follow county and township politics to readily recognize a set of names as opponents in our or some other municipality's.  After all, there are at least eight counties (four in NJ) and innumerable municipalities in the greater Philadelphia market area.  It would certainly help viewers pay more attention if we could hear what seat someone is running for.