Reagan's Pony -OR- Still Voodoo After All These Years

The DFH in me, somewhat openly, dreams of the demise of "Western Society" as it has evolved and is presently practiced. The practical anarchist in me understands that regardless of form,
minimizing entanglements is the wise course of action. The indoctrinated-American in me desperately wants to believe, but is too aware of the discrepancies to reconcile what's supposed to be with what really is. The father of two in me openly regrets the failures of the DFH in me to have an effective influence upon the events of my lifespan to date, is obligated to apologize for that failure and encourage my progeny to succeed where I have failed, in spite of my failure.

So each day I have to gnaw through the restraints, hunt and peck my way through incongruities inundating our twistedly schism-ed realities to unify my uniquely personal MPD into one capable of getting through another day. Adjusting to a new, daily worst-case scenario for which my past misgivings were dismissed by "authority" without a hearing tends to fray ones edges, so reacting to the newest, completely AVOIDABLE, calamity to befall mankind gets harder every day.

There really needs to be a clinical name for this disorder,affliction, state of being. When I assign the blame for our crisis juggling existence, I can say, without reservation, that all credit belongs to Ronald Wilson Reagan. Not that that helps. And no, he didn't do it alone. And we'll never know if he actually knew what he was unleashing upon us all. Still, he gets the lifetime dis-achievement award for being a serial-societal arsonist. The father of Opposite World. Whether his penultimate faith in the fictions he "lived" on the silver screen so detached him from reality, or if, in the end, he actually believed his publicity? Either way,
he set the stage, and carved out the rut we are in.


"We are the rats in the wainscoting of society - we operate outside of their barriers and outside of their rules. Society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as the old wooden buildings had more rats than the concrete buildings that came later. But they still had rats. Now that society is all ferro concrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps between the joints, and it takes a smart rat to find them. A stainless steel rat is right at home in this environment."

-- The Stainless Steel Rat , Harry Harrison (1959)