dumber than a Texan?

Trees are nice. Some years ago there was a woman in the watercolor class and when I learned that she had once lived in Marina City, I was puzzled by how anybody who once lived here would ever want to move out. “Well,” she sighed, “I just wanted to see some trees.”

I don’t remember Atlas Shrugged saying anything about soybeans, but I think there was something subversive about them, probably because they were from China. Now there are probably as much soybeans as there is corn, though a field of soybeans is nowhere near as dramatic as corn.

In Texas they had, as the song goes, miles and miles of miles and miles, and mostly they raised cattle on it. I just read an article on bronco busters in Texas and how the broncs are getting bigger and meaner and the riders are getting killed younger and younger. Oh wait, not broncos, bulls. Well I have to admit I had to google that one to find out exactly what a bronco is, but then it was all about the Denver broncos. You can never find out anything about anything if there is a sports team or a rock band with the same name. Anyway Texans are nuts.

But wait, now that I think about it the article was about Oklahomans. Well Oklahomans are just like Texans only dumber and poorer.

I thought you were taking a side on Ferguson, because all the Foxies were saying something like well how come nobody says anything about black on black crime, as if somehow people should be talking about that instead. But the fact is that everybody is talking about black on black crime all the time, and why does not talking about one preclude talking about the other?

It’s hard to say if the media is blowing it out of proportion. The thing is when something like this happens every politician and pundit wants to get their word in, and the media has to cover that because that is what the news is. But then there is the cable news, and the cable news loves a riot, or a storm, or anything where they can get their reporters standing somewhere with a microphone while all around them is light and noise.

I have to admit I tuned in to it a little bit because what the hell else was on the stupid tube? And at one point I was watching some group of young hotheads in New York I think it was, and they were trying to kick in a cyclone fence so that they could get down to the expressway to block it, and there was the guy with the microphone beside them and all the lights from the cameras, and I have to tell you, for a bunch of hotheads they weren’t making much progress on the fence. One guy would rush up and give it a good kick, and then the next guy, and then the next guy, and I finally asked myself, why am I watching this, and I went to bed.

You know my side of the generation like to think that our protests ended the Vietnam war, but in the mellowness of time I’m not so sure. I think it was more the coffins and the treasure squandered and the way it went on and on without victory and nobody was even sure what victory means. I imagine these protests alienate as many people as it energizes. People marching peacefully may help, but Burn This Bitch down doesn’t.