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Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Subject: When Did Old Happen?
Time: 5:38:58 AM EDT
Author: wangfuzhong2
Mood: Quiet
Music: "Old Rockin' Chairs Got Me"
77 IS 77.
My 91-year-old dog, Miko, has arthritis in two legs. He limps. He has trouble making the step up to the front door. He never runs. He lays down a lot. His 77-year-old life-long friend and care-giver, me, has the same symptoms and behaviors. Only his/my arthritis is in the left shoulder.
We took him to the vet again yesterday and got the bad news. Miko's long walks in the park are out. Which means my long walks in the park are out. I can't imagine going out there with anyone but Miko. Except for my three years in China, we rarely missed a day in 13 years.
Bob Woodward took the title of an autobiography away from me. For sure, I am in a state of denial.
Old age happens to OTHER people. Not me.
Well, folks, old age HAS happened to me. I say that. I don't believe. I don't want to believe it. I refuse to believe it. I won 't believe it. But, Rob, you MUST believe it. Seventy-seven IS 77. And 77 IS old. What else would you call a 77-year-old man if not old? Would you call him "advanced middle aged?" Or "a young 70-something?" Or "a senior citizen?"
Come on, old man, look in the mirror. Look at the loose flab under your arm. Look at the brown spots on the back of your hand. Look at the thin, spindly legs and the bony shoulders. Feel the aches all over your body when you get out of bed in the morning. See how hard it is to get OUT of bed in the morning; or up a steep hill, or on a ladder, or up from a sitting position on the rug in the living room.
Damn!
In "Fiddler On the Roof," Trevi sings "Sunrise, Sunset" about how his children have grown up so fast. "I don't remember getting older....when did they?"
He was bemoaning his "oldness" at the age of 50. I guess I should be grateful my almost acceptance of inevitable maturation has come so late in life.
Of course, being old and accepting oldness does not mean you're dead. I can still type words that make a semblance of sense. I can still sing a mean baritone in the shower. I can think about girls that way. I can still take out all the garbage garbage and the recycled garbage in one trip to the barrels. I can still finish - FINISH - the New York Times Sunday Crossword. I can still walk briskly through a mall, mow the lawns (with the help of a Sears put-put), read - with 2.50 glasses - a wonderful book by J. Krishnamurti my brother John just mailed me, make dinner, make beds, clean the house, fly to JFK, hang a painting on the wall, do the family shopping, drive a car, do my exercises, and shovel up the dog do in the back yard (our granddaughter's big Golden Retriever, Roxy, has been a house guest for the last month: she is remarkably prodigious in a most un-ladylike way.
Please forgive this personal invasion of my life. It's been quite therapeutic. After this, I think I am close to accepting facts. Numbers do not lie. I am 77. And all the protestations and denials will not change that. Besides, as I think about, it definitely beats any alternative I may have.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Friday, March 9, 2007
Subject: If you reading this, you're a good accident.
Time: 5:02:20 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
Mood: Frustrated
Music: Barbra Steisand's "People"
Poor people beget poor people
( Note: A friend in England saw my entry suggesting only human animals should be caged in zoos because only humans kill their own kind. Below, my emailed response to her response.)
Dear Marie,
You wrote, in part:
"I dont mind people coming to visit my cage just as long as they bring treats."
Thank you for that. It made me smile; something we have in short supply these days. Then I THOUGHT about it. Big mistake, that.
Maybe we ARE all in cages. And we can't get out. Six billion human animals are trapped in cages of different sizes and shapes. We're locked in. We can't get out..
For about two billion of us, the cages are real; and worse than the ones in the London Zoo. In the zoo, lions and tigers and Elephants get fed three times a day and they don't have to work for it. They're always comfortable, have free medical care 24/7 and are fed the proper diet. Life expectancy of zoo inhabitants - in people age - is better than most humans.
Two billion of those humans live in conditions unfit for dogs or pigs or horses or goats. Thirty thousand of their children die every day of hunger and disease.
Overall life expectancy is 25 years less than ours. If zoo animals lived in the squalor many of these people do, there would soon be no more zoos.
Four billion of us who - by accident of birth - live where there is ample food and water, doctors and a roof of some sort over our heads. That's all there is for two of the four billion. They live in crowded quarters, sometimes three or four families in one room, crude outhouses, often with one meal a day (a government hand-out). They are the poorest among us - riding our buses and trains, cleaning our streets and our public toilets, dropping out of school to support their families, begging on our streets and languishing in prisons - many unjustly..
Their cages are not of their own making. They are built by an indifferent government, and an indifferent, affluent society who care only for themselves and dismiss the poor as a necessary nuisance. It's true that a few of these two billion people will escape from their cages and move up to middle class cages. But that number is less than a few- thousandths of the total.
Finally, there are two billion of us - one third of the world's population - whose cages have carpets, furniture, hot and cold tappable water, electricity, TV sets, refrigerators, telephones, heating, nearby schools for their children, nearby stores for necessities of life (supermarkets) and malls and department stores for everything else,.
About 700 million of us have a car: a mixed blessing. It drives us to work, stores, schools, resorts, lovers' lanes. Good. But it kills 200,000 humans and maims another two million of us each year and its exhaust fumes are helping destroy our planet. It also costs too much. We can buy a dependable car from China that gets us there and back for under $10,000. @40 miles to the gallon.
So be grateful. You are among the advantaged ones. You live in a comfortable cage. That's a cage of your own making. You're trapped there. You work hard all day. You marry within your class. You get the right education. You earn the right salary. You have the right friends. You moved to the right suburb. Your future is laid out for you. You are in lockstep with everyone else marching to the same drummer. You could opt out. You could take the path less travelled. But you don't. The cage is comfortable. Predictable. Easier. Safer.
Still, what you have is what two-thirds of the rest of human-kind can only wish they had: Hope. And a future. No. Don't congratulate yourself. You had nothing to do with it. You were BORN into it. Just as those barely surviving or living in dire poverty were BORN into it.
The sad truth is, the children of poor people grow up to be poor people.
The children of middle or upper class people grow up to middle or upper class people.
And unless we rid all our cages of the of the likes of Libertarians, Republicans, the Christian Right and the Bush 's, Chaney's and Rumsfeld's, this sad truth, this sorrowful state of affairs will stay the course.
We are the people who put a man on the moon almost 40 years ago. We're a few years away from finding a vaccine to prevent cancer. We sending humans to Mars in the next 20 years. Surely, we can get out of our cages, open our eyes, and see what's really happening out there. Surely, we can elect people who will stand up against the moneyed monsters of the NRA and the tobacco lobby and destroy their factories of death.
Surely we can find a way to feed, clothe and heal the barely surviving and sickest among us. Surely we can find a way to educate the poorest and help them find a better life for themselves.
Surely we can bring peace to the world.
Can't we?
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Thursday, March 8, 2007
Subject: It's a zoo out there
Time: 7:33:41 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
Mood: Quiet
Music: "West Side Story"
Dog Eat Dog.
You know the phrase. Someone's talking about the big shake-up at the company; people with 25 years on the job are demoted or getting fired. Lots of vicious infighting going on. Management guys are going around with knives in their backs.
"It's a dog eat dog world out there, you know."
What an apt phrase it is.
Like humans, dogs are animals, too. If you watch dogs interact with each other for a while, you learn that a loving, gentle dog can turn into a rabid monster in a matter of seconds..
Watch when a German Shepherd eating his Alpo is approached too closely by a Cocker Spaniel. .The spaniel may be just in the neighborhood. But to the Shepherd, he's a threat.
Grrrrrrrrs. Yelps. The nails come out on the Shepherd's front paws, fangs are exposed, and the poor Cocker gets a swift swipe of the Shepherd's paw.
"This is MY dinner and you can't have any."
There isn 't a Dog Court in the world who would disagree with him. Or her .Or it .
Dogs don 't share. They don't understand the word or the concept. The blue bowl is HIS bowl. Pity the person who tries to take it away from him.
(Pity me. My best friend is an 84-year old Shepherd name Miko. He takes me for walks every day, sleeps at the foot of our bed every night, wags his tail and jumps on me when I come home. It's unconditional love. But if I ever reach down to pick up his dish while he's eating, he will bear his fangs and even bite me!)
Dogs are territorial, too. "This is my space. Stay out of it." It's called turf war. Very common among all speciies of animals: from gorillas guarding their babies, to Elephant Seals guarding their part of the beach to gangs of young men in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New Yortk City guarding "their" city blocks.
Seals, dogs, wolves, chimpanzees, mountain goats will fight other animals of their own species to keep their space, their female harems, or their evening meal. But these animals rarely KILL each other in turf wars. A fight between two bears may end up with a little blood- letting; and one of them running off with his tail between his legs.
The loser loses face, loses the females. But he lives to fight another day.
The human animal is different. He is the only mammal - aside from the hyena - who kills his own kind. Humans have turf wars, too; usually one gang against another. But there are drug wars and fights over women and money and maybe which baseball team is better than another.
Humans, of course, are more intelligent, inventive and effective than other animal species. No messy claws or paws or teeth. Just knives and guns - killing tools created by humans to kill other humans. All to the delight of the NRA.
We have evolved into a much more complex being than all other animals. We have the same five senses all other animals have: taste, smell, sight, hearing and feeling, That's good.
We also have an animal's penchant for revenge, possessiveness, power and killing. We're much better at killing than any other animal on Earth. While animals kill only one animal (of a different species, for food) at one time, the human animal has killed 220,000 humans at one time for no reason at all .
Humans are very good at killing each other. We're getting better at it all the time.
We haven't yet figured out what all those grunts, neighs, tweets, squeals, honks, hisses, quacks and brays mean. Maybe they're telling each other something like "it's a human kill human world out there".
Maybe our zoos have it all backwards. Maybe humans should be the ones in cages and the rest of the animals could come to visit us on the weekend.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Friday, March 2, 2007
Subject: ...AND THE DAY BEGINS
Time: 8:35:16 PM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
Mood: Quiet
Music: DuKe Ellington's "Mood Indigo"
SIX BILLION FRIDAYS.
Today is Friday, March 2, 2007. When I woke up this morning, I said aloud - as I often do - "and so the day begins." Begins for whom? For me. Only me. My days - all days - are different from the days of any and all other other human animals on this planet. No one person lives any day exactly like anyone else on Earth.
The words I write and speak will be written and spoken differently than all the hundreds of trillion words heard and seen today.
No one will see, touch, hear and react to the same people the way I do today.
Most of the world hates George Bush and Cheney and the Sudanese government and Al Queada and religious extremism. We just don't hate them all in the same way.
We all will eat more or less of thousands of different foods at different times at different places with different people today.
We will learn different truths, fight different fights, laugh at different things, cry at different hurts, love in different ways with different people than any other human anywhere.
I may see you or touch you or hear you during my Friday while you are in your Friday. We may spend this Friday together. But it will not be the same Friday for the two of us. Only the date will the same. Our days will always be totally different.
And belong only to us.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Monday, February 26, 2007
Subject: My wife broke the law
Time: 7:28:13 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
Mood: Mischievous
Music: Anniversary Waltz
My wife's breaking the law
It all started when I dove into my fireplace 18 months ago and woke up with a dislocated shoulder. My HMO hospital didn't set it right. And now I'll never throw a football again. Which is not too bad because I never could throw a football very well. But it was the five weeks of intebation, the lousy care, the five days in a coma and much else that has put me in my present sorrowful state.
I can't swallow. So I can't eat. So they put a tube in my stomach and - for the last three months - I have been "eating" a special formula three times a day through that tube. I have not tasted real food all that time.
It's always something, as they say. An infected toe. The tube coming out about six times. A yeast infection (I thought only women got y.i., but even with my different plumbing - I got it). And twice-a-week visits to the hospital to visit a Speech Therapist trying to excite my neck nerves to build up my swallowing muscles to that I may eat some day.
Through all this my wife has been a brick. She nurses me. Changes the sheets. Drives me to all the different doctors' offices. Prepares my feedings. Takes my b.p. and pulse beat and temp. She prepares all my medicines, even giving me some not prescribed.
Well, the United States Attorney for Southern California has informed us that the Federal Government - in cahoots - with the American Medical Association and the M.M.F.D. (More Money For Doctors) is preparing to take legal action against my wife, with me as a knowing co-conspirator.
Her crime: Practicing Medicine Without A License.
And I love her for it.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Sunday, February 25, 2007
Subject: Mamaroneck H.S. 1947 Graduation Ball
Time: 3:29:18 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
Music: Benny Goodman Album
TALE OF TWO TOWNS
Mamaroneck High School '47 Graduation Ball
a FebruarySoit It is February the 24th today in Southern California. It is the same exact day in Chicago. The thermometer on the pool slide says 83 degrees. Chicago is 5. I'd rather be here. My grandchildren are playing water tag. The boughs are bowed with big, round fruit on our orange and grapefruit trees. All is well.
What a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in, why it's almost like being in love. Too bad today's generation can't have Cole Porter or Ira Gershwin or Sammy Kahn writing the songs for their high school graduation dance.
I got drunk at my high school graduation dance. It was the night of June21, 1947. One hundred eighty-one just-graduates of Mamaroneck High School were sitting around candlelit tables at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, New York. The boys in tuxes. The girls in gowns.
The next town to Larchmont on Amtrac, New Rochelle is named for La Rochelle, France. That's where the Hugonauts - the enemies of the evil Cardinal Richelieu - sailed for America and freedom in 1600-something. I spent two years there as an Army Reporter during the Korean War.
Larchmont was where so many New York City publishers, TV producers, magazine executives and other rich men lived. It's a 37-minute commute to Grand Central Station: a five minute walk to Madison Avenue. Just long enough to finish Friday's New York Times Crossword Puzzle.
We Larchmont folks did not live in the real world. We grew up during the Depression. But we lived in large, two-story homes with well-manicured lawns and two cars. We had live-in maids, memberships at the Larchmont Yacht Club (on the Long Island Sound) and dancing school at the Episcopal Church once a month. We had doctors' visits. Groceries and laundry were hand delivered. We children were given to believe we were better than other people.
All the kids in Larchmont went to college. We all "found" good jobs. I got an entry level job with a prestigious ad agency in New York. Not on my own: my father's company published magazines that bought a lot of ads. "It's who you know" worked for my friends, too. They would grow up to be just like papa: Money-worshipping Republicans, Presbyterian and better than other people.
I escaped that. My mother was the only Catholic (her maiden name was Cudahay) and the only Democrat in Larchmont. I picked a good mom.
A few of my friends went to Andover, Exeter or other preppy schools. The rest of us went to Mamaroneck High School, a mile walk from my house; a half mile if I crossed the railroad tracks.
Mamaroneck High was really two high schools in one: the Mamaroneck Branch and the Larchmont Branch. De facto segregation.
The Larchmont Branch was made up of mostly of the brightest kids in the school - in the A & B classes.
The Mamaroneck Branch were most of the students in the C and D classes. Many of them were Italian kids whose parents didn't speak English. Their fathers cut the lawns, pruned the hedges, shovelled the snow and planted the flowers for the home owners in Larchmont. Our gardener was named Joe. I never knew his last name.
Mamaroneck was also the home of the men who cleaned our boats; or delivered our groceries and clean shirts; or kept Palmer Avenue and Weaver Street open in the winter; or worked in our drug store, stationery store, hardware store, shoe repair store, barber shop and other shops in Larchmont Village. There were no malls back then. At the Graduation Dance, the Larchmont kids sat at tables on one side of the dance floor; the Mamaroneck kids all sat together on the other side.
Claude Thornhill & His Orchestra provided the music for the night. Somebody at my table ordered me a Stinger. I had never had a Stinger before. I loved it. I had four of them. I was - I thought - the hit of the party. I was told later I made a damn fool of myself. (I was an early alcoholic. I drank heavily all through college and the first 11 years of marriage and fatherhood. I quit with AA's help a 38. I didn't quit forever - one never does. But it's been forever so far.)
I double-dated with Ed Benkle. His dad loaned him their new Buick. His date became his wife, mother of their three kids, now ex-wife. My date was with me in the back seat. She wore this sexy, blue, strapless gown. I kept trying to put my hand down the top of her dress but she wouldn't let me. This was the night - I had fantacized for many nights before - when I would become a man. My plan. Unfulfilled.
We didn't sleep. We parked all night and necked. Next morning we got our swim suits and drove to Jones Beach on Long Island. We sat on the sand drinking beer, telling each other what a great time we were having. I got burned like a lobster.
Fifty years after the Stingers and sunburn, half our class showed up at a beach club in Mamaroneck for our 50th Reunion. I hadn't seen any of them in 50 years. I was surprised at how many faces and names I remembered. They had all changed, of course. Less hair, bigger tummies, lots of grey. sadder eyes.
Only the seating arrangement was the same. They sat just as they satted 50 years ago at the Glen Island Casino: Mamaroneck on the left, Larchmont on the right. There was one big difference: The richest man in the room was on the Mamaroneck side. The son of a gardener, he had built - without daddy -one of the most successful contracting businesses around.
He didn't sit with us. He knew we weren't good enough for him.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Sunday, February 11, 2007
Subject: It's safer to be dumb
Time: 6:00:55 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
THE BRAIN. A WMD?
Human animals are so fragile. Compared to most animals, we are like six billion bunnies bumbling bunnies bouncing about the planet. Bunnies are a favorite food of hawks, eagles, foxes and prairie dogs. They're so easy to kill. So are we.
If the congress would just say no to the National Rifle Association, we'd be harder to kill. Thirty thousand humans in the U.S were killed by handguns last year. The N.R.A. wants guns to be easy to buy. So they bribe the U.S. congresspeople with "campaign funds".
Back to bunnies. And us.
Bunnies are cute. But their funny ears and little pink noses dan't save them from a hungry hawk or a famished fox. Bunny rabbits are killed in great numbers by hundreds of other animals. That's why mommy bunnies bang out so many baby bunnies.
Neither bunnies or humans have claws like a tiger, skin like a rhinocerous, teeth like a wolf, height like a kangaroo, speed like a cheetah, camoflauge like a camelian, crushing strength like a python .
Human animals could have had the same fate as bunnies. But over the years, humans have evolved an extraordinary body part: THE BRAIN.
The human brain is the largest in the entire animal kingdom. Cavemen reasoned that a fire in front of the cave would keep predators away. When humans moved from caves to straw huts, they invented spears and the bow and arrow; they could kill the predators who wanted to eat them, then cook the dead boar over a fire pit and eat IT.
We began to settle into tribes, then into communities, then cities. Then apartment houses. We figured out how to take certain seeds, plant them in the ground and up came calliflower, celery, potatoes and apples. Then, about 1450 A.D., a human named Guttenberg invented the printing press. Up until then, the only humans who could read were the Catholic clergy, kings and members of their court. But with the printing press, they could print thousands of books and essays. So the common people learned to read. They found that being slaves to some king was not fair. So they rebelled.
Humans are the only animal that reads. And writes. And reasons. And invents. They invented microscopes to see the bacteria and other tiny bio germs that caused them to be sick and die. Then they invented poisons to kill the microscopic bugs.
They invented guns to fight other humans who tried to steal their women and their food. Then, millions and millions of humans came into the world. There were fights - wars - between different tribes about what land belonged to who. They invented dynamite and bombs and nuclear bombs to drop on their enemies. Then they invented airplanes from which to drop them.
Any day now, some angry people will get a hold of a nuclear bomb and put it into the middle of a big city somewhere and kill a few million people. Then somebody will try to get even and - eventually - the whole world will blow up.
If that happens, there won't be many people left on this planet. Somebody's bound to blame it all on our brain. They'll say we just got too smart for our own good.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Friday, February 9, 2007
Subject: DARWIN & MY DOG
Time: 7:14:40 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
Who needs Darwin, anyway?
Evolution is a fact of life. That's a fact. An indisputable fact as far as science is concerned. The only people who argue with that fact are the Chrissjun Right - America's equivalent of the Islamic Jihad. These Crissjun fanatics say evolution isn't true; that human animals did not evolve, that they were conceived by god. The story goes that God created Adam and after Adam grew up, God operated on him, took out a rib and abra cadabra made a grown up woman out of it.
No mother, no father, no pregnancy, no morning sickness, no elementary school, high schools, periods, acne; none of that. Then this God lifts Adam and his anthropermorphised rib into the garden of Eden, where a snake spoke to them. Then Adam and Eve ate a poisoned apple and got laid. God, who set this thing up, then tells them that getting laid is a sin and when they have kids they shouldn't do that.
It sounds silly, doesn't it. Like Disney's "Sleeping Beauty". Or Mother Goose. It's a joke. Just like Jesus' execution by the Romans and his rise from the dead.
Most Crissjuns don't even read the book. Many are illiterate They are mostly the poor or uneducated classes who work at menial jobs and have no hope for anything better than their drab lives. So they buy into the life-after-death promise of Crissjianity. Amazing, isn't it: one religion - founded on nothing but a book of fables - fools one-sixth of the world, one billion people!
Every Sunday, in every church and cathedral around the world, priests and pastors stand before their sheep holding a thick, black book in the air and proclaiming "these are the words of God." Children, not old enough to read or write, are taught to sing, "Jesus loves me, yes I know, 'cause the Bible told me so."
Crissjuns make a big thing about the infallibility of the Bible. Everything in that book, they say, is inspired by God. Jerry Falwell rhapsodizes about the "unerrant truth" of the Bible. No fables. No lies. No metaphores. No fiction. All fact. So the Crissjuns HAVE to deny evolution. If they admitted humans are mammals - which we are; if they admitted we are related to the ape family - which we are; if they admitted we have 97% of the same DNA as the chimpanzee - which we do: then they would have to admit the truth - that we evolved through thousands of years AND WE'RE NOT CREATED BY A GOD.
If they admitted that, it would kill the Adam and Eve tale and make Crissjuns take another look at things like Abraham's near-slaughter of his own son because God told him to kill him. Or the burning bush thing. Or Noah's ark. Or Lazerus' rise from the dead. Without their book, Crissjuns have nothing. That's why they created Creationism. But Creationism didn't sell. So now they have ID - Intelligent Design. It's as phony as Creationism. It IS Creationism, with a new name. And it's just as phony.
I don't bother arguing with Crissjuns anymore about evolution. I just show them my dog, Miko, a male; and my cat, Snowball, a female. I put them on their backs, legs up. We have a short anatomy lesson. A penis, a vagina, rectum, legs, arms, mouth, teeth, ears, eyes, nose. Snowball has teats, from which her kittens drank her milk.
That's all. We people are animals. Just like our dogs and cats and all the other animals in the world. We function pretty much the same. We're conceived the same way, birthed the same way, eat the same way, evacuate the same way, eat, sleep, get out of the rain the same way.
I don't need Darwin to prove the Bible wrong. Come over to the house some time and meet Miko. He's very convincing. And if you scratch him behind the ears, he will love you unconditionally forever.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Subject: STUPOR BOWL
Time: 5:17:01 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
HYPE: Colts vs.Bulls,U.S.vs.Iraq.
The American people are the biggest suckers in the world. They believe anything. They buy everything they see on television. They believe guys who wear long, black dresses on Sunday, or wear their collars backwards.
They've been hammered by the Christians and "God Bless America" and "let us pray" before boy scout meetings and "one nation under god" all their lives. God has become a part of their lives. I never occurs to them to ask "where is this God?" Or "The Crissmas story is cute, but a bastard kid born in a barn grows up to become God?" What drugs are you taking?
Hype. Hype is what America is all about. There's not much substance here. At least on both coasts where all the action is. They say "American values" of fairness, honesty, and hard work still exist in parts of Iowa. There's not much of that here in Southern California. Or New York City.
It's no accident America spends more money for advertising than all other countries in the world. Advertising is just hype. Ads don't tell you the truth about a product or a service. They tell you what will make you buy it. They put on a pretty girl with big boobs wearing a Chicago Bears helmet hyping the Super Bowl.
"The game of the year! The world's greatest quarterback faces the world's greatest
defense! The world's greatest half-time show! (Will it be topless AGAIN?)"
And thirty-second commercials costing a million dollars each! Super bowl this; Super bowl that. The match-up of the 21st century! To be seen by 90 million Americans. All trains will stop! Airliners will stay on the ground! The single most-watched show on television! Hype, hype, hype, hype, hype.
The fact is, the Super Bowl is just one more stupid football "game" - with a hellova lot of hype. Twenty two, not-too-bright young men - most at least six-two, 280 pounds - try to hurt one another. It's the Roman Forum reincarnate. Deaths are not guaranteed. But at least 20 young men and boys die every season on the field of battle.
While those 90 million people cheered for their office pool favorite, Miko and I will found a quiet spot under a tree in the park to sit and soak up the sunshine. Miko peed on every tree that's free. I did my New York TImes Sunday Crossword. I still don't know who won. Who cares? 130 Iraqis and five young U.S. soldier died that day in Bagdad. And here we were watching hyped TV ads hyping beer.
I often send some positive thoughts to the young men in Iraq. They'll be forgotten soon. Except for their families who will try to make sense of it all. Their sons and daughters are dying while we play games.
The President of the United States knows a lot about hype. He's good at it. He used hype (Colin Powell at the UN) to sell Congress on a non-existent threat to the U. S. He's killed over 50,000 innocent Iraqis and 3050 young Americans doing it. He still insists he was right. He says God told him to do it.
The Bush Doctrine: Hype heaped upon Hype.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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Thursday, February 1, 2007
Subject: WANTED DEAD: ME
Time: 5:58:15 AM EST
Author: wangfuzhong2
THE U.S. WANTED ME
DEAD 12 YEARS AGO
My government is pissed off at me. According to their actuaries, a male baby born in New York City in 1929 was supposed to live 66 years, to 1995. So - they figured - I'd get Social Security checks for a year or so and they'd come out ahead.
What I've done is live at least 12 years longer than they thought I would. So the money the government has given me is a hellova lot more than what I gave IT through the years.
Seventy years ago, there were no miracle drugs, no cancer cures, no heart by-passes, no polio vaccine.
Very few people lived beyond 65 then. Now most people do. A child born today will live to be 78 years old; unless we elect another Bush.
My government also hates me for what I'm doing to medicare.
In the last 11 years, I've had 19 MRI's, six cat scans, seven hospital visits (from three days to five weeks) , 114 doctors' visits, nine cases of special formula for my stomach feeding
(through a G tube) and 3,555 presciption pills, ointments and shots (at cozy co-pay prices). Some of that may have been a bit of scamming by my HMO.
How much money have taxpayers shelled out for one accident-prone septagenarian on the West Coast? I'm ashamed to say .
Another - more important - question: How the hell do the 40 million Americans withOUT health insurance make it through the year? Or the month?
Universal health care is long overdo. All we have to do to do it is shut up the Republicans, Libertarians and the Christian Right (wrong) who think government should stay out of the social justice business. (Yet not one of them turns down that check every third of month.)
To its credit, my government hasn't urged me - yet - to take up parachute jumping, Russian roulette or race car driving. Still, I know they're mad at me. I don't care. In fact, I think I'll live to be a hundred. That'll really piss them off.
Written by wangfuzhong2
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