strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
« new toy! | Main | frost heave »
Jan 20 04: politics and disgust
Ha! You thought this would be about the State of the Union Address. Nope. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t! I can’t watch the President speak for more than about thirty-five seconds before I begin to feel the need to leave the room or scream at the television or throw things. I didn’t need that kind of angst tonight. Besides, we already knew the sorts of things he was going to say: war good, faggot marriage bad; terrorism bad, unfunded mandates good; corporate welfare good, assistance to the working poor bad. Oh, and also this new thing he’s on about, “Mars Mars Mars!”
You know. The thing that proves that Dubya has vision, and stuff. The one where we build Moon Base Alpha for trillions of dollars, which somehow gets us to Utopia Planitia on the cheap. The one that may somehow have sucked the funding away from more immediately useful things like Hubble, only that theory is Officially Denied. Right, that one.
Well, as it turns out, the Mars thing didn’t really come up. But I’ve had this simmering away in my head for days now, and I’d like to deliver it anyway. I used to think that the Mars and/or Bust Plan was a bald attempt to distract us from fiscal mismanagement and cronyism and warmongering and the erosion of our civil rights, and nothing more. And now I’ll admit that this was incorrect. It was all of those things…plus yet another opportunity to benefit Halliburton. Well, Halliburton and a number of other corporations that have given money and/or to which the administration has close ties. I know, terribly cynical of me to say any such thing, and it’ll probably get me sent to Guantanamo or at the very least accused of Political Hate Speech—and what on Earth does that mean, anyway?—but I’m not the first to suggest it.
Ugh. How did we get here? How do we make it stop?