The ongoing spat in DC about the debt ceiling seems to be staggering to a close like some cheesy 10 round county fair boxing match between two fat guys so I thought I’d browse through the Sunday papers to see what else was going on. Unfortunately it’s as if today was “depressing news only day” because after a couple of passes through the local rags I wanted to eat about 100 pancakes and just go lay down. Random death, insanity, perversion and Amy Winehouse, someone who sadly personified all of them at once, comprised the news of the day, making the noxious stew of political snake oil and bile seem palatable by comparison. Everywhere you turn people are killing each other, deliberately or accidentally.
A gunman opens fire at a roller rink, killing 5 people before killing himself. Yeah, that’ll show ‘em. It was probably the disco music. I have never understood the pissed off guy – almost always a guy – who runs amuck and then kills himself. If you’re that unhappy just jump right to that last part and get it over with. I always wonder if the mentality is some kind of analogue of the Muslim suicide bomber – they do something incredibly horrible and senseless thinking that they get the girl in the end – or girls in their case. There’s a special corner of hell where all these guys are sitting around going, “Wait…they said there’d be chicks…and falafels”
An eleven year old girl sitting on her cousin’s bed in San Francisco was shot while waiting for a snack of carrots and peanut butter at 11:30 at night, too excited to go to sleep after watching Iron Man with her little brother. Dirt bag gang bangers, probably pissed off at each other because one of them looked at the other one wrong, decided to shoot it out in the park across the street and – because they are such stupid idiots – they didn’t hit each other but managed to pump a few rounds through the wall of her uncle’s house and hit her in the chest. She’s alive but they shouldn’t be.
Then there was the shoot out at the low rider corral in Washington state, another case of somebody getting “disrespected” or some shit and whipping out the nine-mils at a car show. Ten people ended up shot and taken to the hospital. With any luck, it was the dumb asses with the big guns and tiny dicks and not some innocent kids thinking they were just checking out some cool rides.
Of course, not all the idiots are gang bangers; some of them are just drunks in boats. In Wisconsin a pontoon boat loaded with liquored up knuckleheads celebrating an upcoming wedding wandered blindly into the path of a speedboat, killing two people and leaving two more missing and presumed dead – a typical bit of summer madness at the intersection of alcohol and machinery.
Locally the news is still full of the aftermath of the three hikers who – against every single sensible impulse – climbed a guardrail, ignored multiple signs and wandered into the river above Vernal Falls in Yosemite, where almost inevitably they slipped and went over in a nightmarish and tragic daisy chain in front of nearly 200 horrified fellow hikers. Their bodies have not turned up yet after falling over 300 feet.
And of course there is the almost indescribable horror in Norway, a country where violence of this magnitude has been absent since WW II. An Aryan-looking Timothy McVeigh wanna be decides that – in the interest of some hare-brained manifesto on European independence – he simply had no choice but to ruthlessly kill everyone he encountered at an island summer camp until the police showed up, whereupon he laid down his gun and surrendered. This miserable lunatic didn’t even have the decency to kill himself in the end. And in Norway he will probably get some kind of prison sentence and not the hypodermic in the neck that he deserves.
After riding this relentless battering ram of bad news and sordid testament to the worst in human behavior I turned the final page and there was a picture of John Boner and Harry Reid, heads together obviously discussing matters of grave concern to the republic. Somehow it seemed fitting…
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