Random Thoughts of a Radical Progressive Puerto Rican

-=[ Ramblin’ Man]=-

I don’t mean to poke fun at such a serious topic, and I should add that I once seriously considered the same route, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that a NYC man yesterday jumped off his high rise building, plunged 40 stories, landed in the backseat area of a Dodge Charger after crashing through the windshield... and survived. Broken legs, critical condition.

When I made the commitment to jump, a strong wind from an early November Nor’easter knocked me on my skinny, seriously malnourished, drug addicted ass as I attempted to scale the Brooklyn Bridge’s pedestrian walkway (yes, a drama queen to the end, no regular rooftop for yours truly. I was going out in style, muthafuckas!). Some would say that the wind was a blessing or a gift from some God (who apparently had nothing better to do that day), but my state of mind was such that I considered the event the worst of insults: I was such a loser; I couldn’t even commit suicide successfully. I became convinced that with my luck, my suicide attempts would only manage to leave me crippled, so I stopped all thoughts of taking the short cut. I did try to get other people to do it for me, but that’s another story.

So today, as I reflect on this man's actions as well as my own, I wonder about his thoughts, his state of mind, and I have to wonder if he's regretting having survived his actions... I wish him some measure of serenity and clarity.

Oh yeah, President Obama... the speech last night is now being eviscerated for not being celebratory enough by the same chickenhawk pundits and politicians who cooked the evidence in creating that Mess in Mesopotamia in the first place. I’ll be honest and admit that I didn’t watch the speech, but I getting some chuckles from people like Chuckles the Clown (Charles Krauthammer), and that Wolfowitz twit (the latter stating that we should stay in Iraq, like, forever).

Well, people? How the fuck do we celebrate the cluster fuck now known as the Iraq War? It was a mistake from the get-go; incompetent men who had never fought a war bungled it from the beginning. Moreover, let’s not forget that we shouldn’t have been there to begin with. And you know what? This ain’t over yet, you bloodthirsty imbeciles. Rachel Maddow does a great job of listing the lies that took us there:

There will be more American and Iraqi lives needlessly sacrificed for a long time to come.

Speaking of evisceration and lies, Vanity Fair just published a must-read on Sarah Palin. “Erratic behavior and a pattern of lying matter little: ‘Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship.’” Duh! No surprise there, but the article is worthwhile in that it documents beyond a shadow of a doubt that Palin and the Right are just a bunch of crazy muthafuckas with an deeply embedded aversion to reality testing.

While I’m on the reality-challenged brigade, let me mention that Beck’s Whitestock hate fest, taking place on the anniversary of the civil rights’ March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was an failure of epic proportions. The folks of this mostly Caucasian pity party rolling on state-sponsored scooters attempted to "take back" the words and philosophy of Martin Luther King. They do this based specifically on a distortion from one line from one speech: “... one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” As Tim Wise points out in his excellent Op Ed, this is the line conservatives habitually reference when attacking affirmative action. If King believed in character over color, they submit, he would have opposed such programs in employment or college admissions. Of course, if more conservative white people (and their black and brown enablers) actually read MLK’s works and the rest of his “I have a Dream Speech,” they would know that he also said:

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”

DANG! Additionally, the same people who call me a “race-baiter,” “race hustler,” and “plantation overseer,” would say the same about MLK. In fact, conservatives at the time of the civil rights movement, called MLK and other civil rights leaders, guess what? Socialists and commies!!! LOL! Which lends credence to the notion that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I would add (in paraphrase) that while it is true that history does repeat itself, it does first as tragedy and then as farce.

Finally, I won’t get into it as deeply as I should (perhaps tomorrow), but they’re coming after Social Security again. Social Security, people, is a manufactured crisis. There is no death knell tolling for Social Security and with minor tweaks, it could go in perpetuity. Watch out for the Goobers coming after Social Security and also for their bleats around the deficit. But those thoughts are for another day.

Well, that’s it. I probably had more thoughts to share, but in the process of thinking more thoughts, I forgot the ones I wanted to post here...

BTW, don’t think so much, it makes my dick itch.

Love,

Eddie