thoughts on 'Boogie Man'

Watched this Frontline (PBS) program last night, on the life of Lee Atwater.

This is the bastard that, up until last Tuesday, had so poisoned the Media/Politics/Religion complex since the Age of Nixon. Perhaps thanks to his own personal demons, this bald-faced liar and all-around little shit was responsible for the electoral successes of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes, and was the adored role-model of another little shit named Karl.

I have to admit that, by the end of the program, when Lee was horribly wracked by hideous physical changes from his brain tumor, I had the largest burst of schadenfreude in my life. As they carried his casket down the church steps, I shouted 'good riddance'.

With any luck, the Obama victory will help candidates, in the future, to stand up to malicious political chicanery, but, I fear, there will always be smart, twisted little men, full of hate and thirsting for power at any cost, who will look you in the eye and tell you what both you and they know just ain't so.

I will dance on Karl's grave, too, but I hope it is preceded by a long prison sentence.

Normally I am a charitable, forgiving kind of guy, but not this morning.

OK, now that that is out of the way, I can get back to thinking about the proposed bail-out of the US auto industry. Last night, somewhere in the news, there was a story about the growing auto market in India, with Indian leaders telling us that now it's their turn to enjoy the wonders and freedom of personal cars, and we have no right to tell them that it's bad for the Earth, so they should not go that route.

The argument in favor of propping up the US automakers is that 'so many jobs throughout the economy rely on cars, so this industry must be saved'. The absurd extension of this argument was best voiced by Douglas Adams, in one of the Hitchhiker books, where he described a planet that had reached the 'Shoe-Event Horizon', which was that, eventually, the rules of manufacturing efficiency and economics resulted in every shop on the planet being a shoe-shop.

Perhaps it's time to adopt an economic base industry other than cars, one whose success will produce jobs that can't be outsourced and that will have subsidiary benefits (um, like solar units on every building, like we saw in Turkey) rather than cars, whose success leads only to choked roads, gridlock, road-rage, pollution, and the scary proliferation of cup-holders.

'nuff said. Is the coffee ready yet?

Good morning.