Some Iraqi immigrants — eight or nine of them, I’d estimate — came out to dance in front of the courthouse here in the Fort today and wave American flags. I noticed Raad, the guy I wrote about a couple weeks ago, wasn’t among them, at least not from the pictures I saw. Raad — when I talked to him, anyway — was one of those cynical Iraqi immigrants who thinks the war’s all about oil and American business interests. He participated in the Shia uprising in ’91, got his ass kicked and doesn’t trust President Boosh. I need to give Raad a call, find out what he thinks now. News moves so fast now; he’s so March 30.
I’ll not be one of those anti-war people getting all mopey over the fall of Baghdad. This is good news. Great news. But I’ve said it’s what comes after that concerns me, and we’ll see what comes after. The road to Damascus? Another inscrutable terrorist organization to worry about in 15 years? We’ll see. For now, we’ll celebrate. I wish I had a ministry to loot! A statue to topple and then beat with my shoes! Around here, the only opportunity we have for such antics is when Ohio State beats Michigan. Or doesn’t beat Michigan.
That’s a good thing, I know. When I was hosting talk radio, I took a call from a guy who said, quite seriously, that he wanted to live in the 19th century, but probably more like the 18th, "because the government wasn’t always butting into your life and stuff back then." I said, yeah, but you’d also have to cut wood and chop ice and make hay and nurse your livestock and have nine children and watch seven of them die before their second birthday, and there’d be no Miles Davis CDs or interstate freeways or Budweiser or Tampax or Tylenol or even many books, and you’d get pox and tuberculosis and measles and typhus and whatEVER, and yeah, you wouldn’t pay federal income taxes, but would it be worth it? Isn’t modern life in the U.S. of A. just the coolest? Isn’t it a great time to be alive?
No, he said.
I really hated that show. It wasn’t until I got a co-host that I started enjoying talk radio. I needed someone there in the studio to remind me that the whole world isn’t lonely and crazy, which is a real easy conclusion to come to when you’re doing it all by yourself. Although it wasn’t a wasted experience; I’d never even known about these crazy anti-government people until they started calling me and yammering on about Ezra Pound and the Federal Reserve and the Jewish banking conspiracy. When the Murrah building blew up in Oklahoma City, I called Mark the Shark, my co-host, and said, "Which one of these crazy-ass white boys did this?" and he thought it might be a follower of one of the shows that aired only on shortwave, but we both agreed the swarthy Middle Easterner profile was wrong, wrong, wrong. And we were right.
You know what’s scary? Only one FBI agent felt the same way.
</tangent>
I have little bloggage today. OK, no bloggage. Long, busy day — carpool, groceries, dog walk, lunch with job candidate, seven hours on the desk, and a column somewhere in there, too. I feel bad for job candidates at these meal/interviews; how can one enjoy food at such a time? We might as well put a bowl of Purina in front of them and say bon appetit. I had the steak and mushroom salad at Paula’s, and I’m here to tell you, that’s a salad. Virtue and decadence all on one plate.
Here’s something: As you know, we in Indiana do not observe Daylight Saving Time. The arguments for and against are so tiresome you want to smash your head against a cinderblock wall, but I ran across the Poor Man explaining a long absence on his blog, and I decided if only the anti-DST forces would put their argument this way, they might get a wider constituency than the cranky farmers and old people who suppor them now:
I‘m not dead or anything. I had a little cold for a while, and so I was out of it, and then daylight savings time came along, and it totally fucked me up. Daylight savings time is such fucking bullshit. It’s all like "hey, here’s a free hour of sleep in the autumn. You get to sleep, while at the same time preserving endangered daylight." And then you have a lovely late morning, and then life goes on through the winter to the spring, and all of a sudden the DST shows up again and is all like "BAM! Now it’s time to pay the motherfucking piper, motherfucker!" and kicks you out of bed at some unholy hour of the night masquerading as 7AM, and sends you off to work or school or the methadone clinic or wherever like a fucking zombie with the I Got Up Way Too Fucking Early thousand yard stare. I’ve got a delicate constitution anyway, being kind of a Percy Bysshe figure, typing away here in my laudenum swoon, and I think this daylight savings bullshit has permanently fucked me. I’m such a fucking zombie, I’m like five minutes away from just taking a bite out of someone’s arm and there’s no way to stop me unless you put a crowbar through my brain! Fuck fucking daylight savings time.
Also, thanks to John my web host for resetting the counter, but you gave me 60,000 undeserved hits. For purposes of accurate record-keeping, I’d like to return them.
See you tomorrow, at the regular time. I think.