I may not be returning to Smalltown’s Truth Sneakers Anonymous meetings. An outspoken Mr. J decided to take the floor with his tea-party agenda last night. I watched reasonable people being swayed by his words, and I probably made some enemies before leaving the church basement where we meet. This was polite company until yesterday, and our meetings were not meant to be a forum for political discourse. The U.S. president is not trying to sink the nation, buy up our ammo, starve the Armed Forces, or capitulate with terrorists, and the disadvantaged and immigrant elements in America are not crushing the economy by using food-stamp programs to buy Mercedes or shopping Nordstroms with fistfuls of EBT cards. America is being abandoned and we cannot look to Congress or the White House for support anymore. They don’t work for us. They don’t work period.

I grew up angry with our government for many things, but our lawmakers have been absorbed and nullified by the truly big moneyed groups and I don’t know why anyone would imagine otherwise. We’ve watched and supported America Incorporated for many decades with our reckless spending exceeding our output, and our election of officials who could only deliver on promises to their masters. This year we saw the biggest sweepstakes ever rewarded to Wall Street through the elimination of jobs and benefits, and our banks received welfare support that was supposed to be marked as stimulus for American enterprise. That money instead has been sent overseas just as our oil is about to be spilled from Keystone to foreign markets. Meanwhile energy, food, health care, and taxation costs have risen along with unattainable educational tuition.

I was angry 40 years ago when the bean-counters were quietly taking over R&D departments and the CEOs were innocently looking for less expensive production techniques. I wrote a nasty letter to General Electric then and walked out on what might have been a rewarding future. Where were you crazy dudes with your silly pistols then? Why weren’t you launching your soup cans at the White House when Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ was announced and the banks were subsequently deregulated? Where were you nut balls when we mounted our heinous and  disastrous efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq? How about being held gunpoint for bank bailouts? And what was that inane crap about ‘government keep your hands off our medicare’? You fools had a president trying to buck the trend to your advantage by expanding Medicare to everyone by diminishing the insurance companies interest. Corporate backlash promptly saw United Healthcare and Wellpoint drafting the new insurance laws because you low-functioning types would rather see those out-of-network unapproved-procedure notices in your mail instead of having a ‘government bureaucrat’ between you and your doctor.

Let me get this straight, J. You mistakenly blame Barack instead of George for freeing the fetters that ban our armies from turning on our citizens in case of uprising. The directive hasn’t been rescinded because of continued threats posed by folks like yourself! And you want President Obama to supply the military with more tanks and planes and bronze bullet casings but when those same forces arrive in your town to take over, you want more 22 caliber and 9mm ammo to drive them back offshore to fight the real enemy who we’ve been arming and whose treasuries we’ve been bolstering since before you took your first dump?
Holy crap.

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.” – Carl Bernstein -1992

Sorry J. Of course we are all saddened, angered, and feeling the insecurity of knowing things are spiraling out of control, but this is not new and it’s not going to end in some grand engagement of opposing forces like good and evil, rich and poor, capitalists and communists, anti-and pro-abortionists, gay and straight supporters, Democrats and Republicans or any of the myriad standoffs that Roger Ailes and his Foxy smoke-screener friends like to cloud the stage with. We are not going to be downing cans of Campbell’s soup while we swap out our 100 round magazines and then rebuilding each others barns and high-fiving after the dust settles. The more precarious our infrastructure gets and the more dependent we allow ourselves to become on electronic transfer and satellites the more likely you’ll be aiming your trusty AK at your own neighbor stopping by for some spaghettios.

Always, always follow the money, J. It’s the only globally accepted religion!