Counting our Blessings

Dear George,

Congratulations on being the first president in history to duck a flying shoe. That’s democracy in Iraq for you, a size 10 shoe and Abu Ghraib.

Your calm reaction to the incident shows that you haven’t lost your insensitivity. The core of your genius as a leader is that you simply don’t give a shit. The apathetic never experience failure because there is nothing they care about, so it follows that they can lose nothing.

That is another reason you and I resonate so well. We’re both ethical slugs who leave trails of putrid slime in our wake, which we never smell.

We view the world through the cracked lens of an ideology run amok. Our norm is distortion so we go around breaking things so they will match the refracted perception with which we see them.

What I do with dishes and furniture, you do with countries and civilizations. I’ll end up with a mug shot in the local police station; you will end up with a marble bust in your presidential library. That’s one of the perks of being born to wealth and privilege. The poor get jail; the rich get elected.

But, I am not bitter. The rationalized fantasy we call psychology has conditioned me to accept my lot and to believe that my manifold defects are due to a psyche damaged by a pair of inept parents, and that all the ills I suffer--my poverty and my hunger, my damaged health and weak lungs—all of them are personal ills and not systemic ones.

And so I pop the pills that make me feel whole in my wretchedness. I fire up a pipe when things get really bad, which is most of the time. My teeth rot and my breath is rank, and yet, I am thankful, in my squalor, for the manifold blessings of being a loyal, patriotic American who has duct taped a broken flag pin to what is left of his lapel.

And I say thank God for the psychologists and educators who have turned us into a nation of well-behaved sheep who remain meek and silent as our world sinks into the economic ruin that is allowing the rich to prosper as they suck what is left of our capital up towards the pointy peak of their pyramid.

We’re good citizens, George, and good citizens don’t make trouble. It’s all about law and order.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones