Every time I sit down to write a column, “insert column here:” faces me, because I put it there the night before. There are times that’s the only way I can get started. This is one of those times. I hate this week’s news. I want to go back to the good old days, when we only had advisors in Vietnam. When Russians were Communists and couldn’t be friends with our president.
This column is guaranteed to give our managing director a crushing headache, but won’t give you a headache, I hope, dear reader.
I have figured out why President Trump withdrew our troops from Syria. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize almost exactly 10 years ago. Trump has decided he has to line one up. He’s taken us out of Syria so he can say, “Look, everyone! I made peace! I make the best peace of anyone in the world! No one is dying, because of me!”
I’m a little unclear on the details. Why will the Nobel Prize Committee vote for him? I doubt Trump would bribe them — he hates parting with money. He can’t hold up military aid. Maybe he’ll just send Giuliani to harass them until they relent.
Is it just me or is Rudy Giuliani morphing into Gilbert Gottfried, only without the mind or the youthful disposition?
Everything Trump does reminds me of Salvador Dali taking his anteater for a walk in Paris.
I mean that in the nicest possible way. I hold Salvador Dali in high esteem, for some reason. I think he appeals to the adolescent in me. At heart I’m 14, and I want all the world’s clocks to melt and for time to stop. Yes, I just drew a straight line from Salvador Dali to Peter Pan and implied the line goes through Donald Trump and me.
Trump and his supporters all want time to stop and flow uphill and backward until America is what it was in the 1950s, except for the high taxes on the rich. Don’t want that. They want the ’50s back but don’t want to pay for them.
They want the days when Wally abused Beaver and we thought it was funny. And Uncle Milty, Milton Berle, wore a dress but wasn’t gay. And the actor who played Lassie was a boy dog playing a girl dog, but he wasn’t gay.
It’s the dream of the perpetual teenager, to have all the adult toys but never have to earn them. When I was 16, I wanted a Mustang. I never got one. You know why? They cost money.
Here in Seattle, the dream is that homelessness can be stopped by forcing homeless people to move their tents every other day. When you look at the price tag for sweeps and compare it to the price tag for actually housing people, you understand what’s really happening: Junior wants a Cadillac but doesn’t want to pay for it, so he settles for a Vespa.
We get one whiny tale of woe after another in the local press and on radio and TV about how much businesses suffer because of all the rampant homelessness.
“It’s driving down tourism!”
“I was going to open a second store in the city, but now I’m going to open one in another city altogether.”
“I only have a Vespa, so I can’t get a date. It isn’t fair.”
Where would that guy go? San Francisco? Or some other place where no one wants to pay the taxes required to return us to the ’50s, when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent?
If you want the country the way it was under Eisenhower, pay what your grandparents paid for it. Otherwise, quit whining, lean back and enjoy the decay. This isn’t Neverland.
I am sympathetic to the urge. I’m 14 going on 71. I still love Dali and Heavy Metal Magazine and psychedelic art. But, you guys, you gotta get real sometimes. Focus, focus, focus.
Bonus material for teachers’ pets:
Trump clearly thinks he’s a hero because he hasn’t started a worldwide nuclear war yet. He saves the world every day, and we don’t appreciate it. Think of at least three other ways he thinks he’s a hero, and arrange them in order of absurdity.
Draw a straight line from Picasso to Lady Gaga. For extra points, pierce Trump with it.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd. He can be reached at drwes (at) realchangenews (dot) org
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