The Poet's Eye 
        commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgmental

 

Mud Wrestling
for release on 10-13-04

I can't decide what to write about this week. I thought about the presidential cock-fight, but everybody will be writing about that. Then there is the Camp Cupcake story--Martha going to jail. Maybe I should write about Kobe Bryant and the sleazy bimbo that turned her tail up for him and then decided she wanted a slice of his money. Oh, and of course there's the price of oil and the bombs going off all over Iraq and Egypt and Israel. Beheadings? Or perhaps I should just give up writing altogether and become a Nascar driver. The audience is better. Or I could run for office in Afghanistan. They would probably let me vote there.

Nothing seems to catch my imagination. Even when I try to dream about Ann Coulter and Arianna Huffington in a nude mud wrestling contest, I can't get excited. The same old crowd of friends always shows up at times like these. Headache, Dyspepsia, Lethargy and Depression are usually the first to arrive. When Constipation and Self-Pity get here, that's when I call it a party. I know they won't leave until they drink all my booze and smoke all my stash and eat all my food and seduce my woman.

I won't bore you with the details, it's not a pretty picture. As soon as I want the party to end so I can go to bed, Nightmare shows up to steal my sleep. That wasn't Ann and Arianna in the mud pit, it was Theresa Hines Kerry and Laura Bush. Much better than the debates, but terrifying in it's own way.

In the meantime the "election" is going queer in Afghanistan. How can the Afghans be expected to maintain a democracy when they can't even take a proper thumbprint? All 15 candidates opposing U.S.-backed interim President Hamid Karzai withdrew in the middle of voting, charging the government and the United Nations with fraud and incompetence. The opposition candidates claimed the ink used to mark people's thumbs rubbed off too easily, allowing for mass deception. Maybe we should let them come and monitor our elections.

The next thing to happen in my bad dream is that the Bush administration claims that because their puppet Karzai was "elected," that somehow democracy has erupted in Afghanistan That's about as likely as Mount St. Helens spewing popcorn. Am I dreaming or just depressed? Jose Cuervo is my only friend at times like these. Am I crazy to think that a giraffe can't give birth to a horse? Why should we expect a culture that has never known democracy (in the biblical sense) to give birth to it? That's almost as absurd as thinking that free and fair elections will be accomplished in this country in November, much less in Iraq next January. But then, some people believe in immaculate conception.

I still can't decide what to write about this week.

The Poet's Eye
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