project 365 #23: chessmen watching the SOTU

project 365 #23: chessmen watching the SOTU
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

This was kind of an accidental picture and I wish that different people had been behind the chessmen, instead of close friends of mine who are passionately involved liberals and thoroughly like the farthest thing from pawns that you can imagine. That said, damn! Is this a cool shot or what? The state of the union. . . the pawn. . . the entire fucking thing. Taken tonight at the Drinking Liberally Asheville State of the Union Party, whereby we all knocked it back at the mention of certain words, like Evil and Terror and Nucular, like Iraq (we had to retire that one) and Troops and Surge.

I hate watching stuff like this - partly because I have no immunity to TV, since I haven't had one since 2000 - and partly because the whole giant farce of evil and cruelty becomes so fucking horribly apparent whenever the entire power structure is gathered together in one room, as in the State of the Union address. There they all are, in hideous ties, our representative government: apparently our country consists pretty much of old white men with a few old white women scattered around and 8 African-Americans, looking a bit uneasy. It's the 21st century and those are our representatives, including a president who has personally done more to eliminate womens' rights than the last six presidents combined, standing up like he's all pro female, welcoming Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker - something that should have happened a fucking generation ago.

And when I see all of them, in their power pastel ties, women carefully dressed in suits of red or white or blue, I'm so reminded of the beginning of a Robert Anton Wilson book, probably Cosmic Trigger, where he talks about all the various leaders - high on speed and downers and power, paranoid and crazy and so fucking hyped full of wacked out chemicals, natural and otherwise, that they've long since abdicated from the human race. This is what I think when I look at rooms full of politicians and it scares the fuck out of me and makes me a little sick.

And so we drink heavily, because you have to laugh, right, when the "leader" of the "free world" says nucular instead of nuclear and when he seems to earnestly believe that our health care "system" is working just fine, in need only of expansion, instead of the sick fucking joke to the rest of the world that it actually is. It's kind of like our war in Iraq, going so swimmingly well that it needs only some 95,000 soldiers - apparently mercenaries - to come in and fix it. French foreign legion? 95,000 contract laborers, maybe the 2nd class citizens he proposes to create to fix immigration, will fix this war. Drink heavily, children. It's all that's left.