Singing In The Rain
for release 01-31-06
Washington D.C.
There is a General Electric commercial that runs on the major networks. I love this commercial. It shows an elephant dancing in the rain and is an homage to the Gene Kelly Singing in the Rain scene. It's a totally charming commercial. I love to watch it. It makes me smile every time I see it. It projects freedom and wildness and abandon. Of course it's a total fantasy.
This is what blows my mind. It's the fact that in the face of real threats to human beings on this planet in general and our own citizens in particular, threats like global warming which causes the kind of hurricane that recently destroyed an entire American city, and AIDS which kills millions per year and high fuel costs which burden every family in America, our government wants us to believe that the primary threat to our security and happiness is a handful of fanatic towel-heads who are hiding out in caves somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's mythology. The whole notion is a fable and a calculated distraction. It is designed to take the public mind off the real things which affect our lives and that the government is failing miserably to deal with. I'm talking about things like our hopeless dependence on foreign oil or the rape of the American Middle Class by corporations who want to renege on their pension and benefit promises. And did I mention global warming?
Maybe these are problems that are too large to worry about. Maybe we've just read enough comic books and seen enough James Bond movies to believe that there is an evil secret organization at large in the world that is bent on the destruction of Truth, Justice and the American Way.
We hear our leaders and pundits and news reporters talking about the war on terror as if it were actually a real thing. They should call it a war on our credulity and our pocketbooks. In the name of this fictional war, and by means of whorish fear-mongering, politicians everywhere have coaxed us into ignoring our real problems and the things which actually threaten us.
Local authorities in San Diego recently discovered a tunnel from Tijuana to inside the US. It was used to smuggle drugs from Mexico. They found over a ton of marijuana in the tunnel. They will probably pile it all up and burn it. I call that drug abuse.
But let's suppose that instead of a harmless plant, the owners of that tunnel had chosen to smuggle a nuclear device. The bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima was named Little Boy. It had a length of 3 m, a diameter of 71 cm, and a mass of 4000 kg. It contained about 64 kg of uranium. It would have easily fit through that tunnel.
The president will probably try to tell us in his State of the Union speech, that Osama bin Laden is trying to dig a tunnel from Pakistan to Washington. Then Al Queda will hire a camel team to drag a nucular device through the six-thousand mile tunnel and detonate it under the Capitol Building. It's not gonna happen.
The Poet's Eye sees that there are threats to our Nation and our security and our very human existence, but they are not the threats upon which BushCo wants you to focus. They don't want you to think about the fact that we are killing our planet with rampant burning of fossil fuel. They don't want you to notice that you are being raped each time you pass the gas pump or the pharmacy counter. They don't want you to remember that once you had a secure pension which has evaporated along with hundreds of thousands of real jobs. They don't want you to dwell on the fact that corporations are ruling your lives. No, they want you to believe in James Bond stories about evil geniuses out to destroy your way of life. They want you to believe in dancing elephants.
I'm singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feelin'
I'm happy again
I'm laughing at clouds
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for love
Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I've a smile on my face
I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Just singin',
Singin' in the rain
--Don Lockwood
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