The Village Idiot

When I was a teenager I lived in a small mining town in the heart of an area rich in silver, zinc, lead, and gold. For many years the many mines routinely dumped their waste into a small river that ran through our town. The result of this, of course, was a severly polluted river that ran a kind of grey milky unhealthy looking color and killed all the fish and more or less every other living thing. As the river was useless for any other purpose, people dumped their garbage, used refrigerators, tires, unwanted kittens and all other forms of detritus in it. We referred to it as the "Lead Creek." It was unbelievably vile.

There was a village idiot in our town. It was said he became an idiot because he had drank from this poisonous source. As a boy I never believed this. Now, however, knowing so much more than I did then, I believe this might have been true. In any case, this retarded boy was the subject of much fun. People would encourage him to do truly stupid things for their amusement. For example, they would goad him into pretending to be a cheerleader thus making an even bigger fool of himself. Once, I recall, they told him to join a parade where, again, he was seen as an utter moron. They would send him out to find a "left-handed monkey wrench," or on fake "snipe hunting" expeditions, and things like that. Actually, in spite of his retardation, he was a nice kid. He never hurt anyone, always had a smile on his face, and was seemingly unaware that he was being made to play the fool.

I mention this here only because George W. Bush reminds me so much of this unfortunate child. He seems to be obviously encouraged by his evil vice-president and his gang of thieves and bullies into doing truly outrageous things. I am never certain that he truly understands what he is saying or doing. His recent speech is a good case in point. First, he seemed to be almost drugged, reading his prepared speech like a retarded person might read it, and apparently not emotionally connected to it or to the implications of what he was mouthing. And what he was proposing was so outrageously at variance with what virtually all others in the known world had advised one had to wonder if he was completely sane (or perhaps just somewhat retarded). This had been touted as the most important speech of his presidency. It was a complete and total dud, a failure so grand as to make you wonder if he still had any interest in his job (he has never demonstrated much interest in it up until now anyway). He has clearly become the Captain Queeg of the not-so-great-anymore-ship of state. Can he really survive for another two years? Can we?

Can anyone explain to me why Donald Trump's juvenile behavior with respect to Rosie whats-her-name is worthy of as much media attention as the "war" in Iraq? I do not watch the news all day but I turn it on from time to time to see how the market is doing or hoping that some dramatic event has occurred (apart from the ubiquitous car chases). I am always disappointed. I have concluded that if anything really important happened the MSM wouldn't tell me about it. Anyway, as near as I could tell today there were only three stories of much interest to the media and they seemed to be receiving about the same amounts of attention: the "surge," Trump vs. Rosie, and the Duke Lacrosse team maybe and maybe not rape case. That's it. Oh, yeah, there were apparently some kind of hearings going on in Washington D.C. about what, if anything, they were going to do about Bush's call for the "surge." But that was mostly yesterday's news. There was a brief mention that perhaps we were going to attack Iran and something about us now being involved in Somalia, and some mention of a problem with Syria, but none of these items were apparently worthy of more than passing mention. I forgot, there was something or other about underwear or perhaps the lack of it, and Prince somebody-or-other's" girlfriend was getting a lot of attention. All in all a really exciting news day. If you wake up tomorrow and find we are in the middle of World War III don't say you weren't warned.

The market was up again today. Happy days are here again?