TV News LIES

One drawback to having many interests is the sense of always sampling, but never really eating a full meal -- just wandering around in circles with a tiny appetizer plate that would struggle to accommodate half a grapefruit, looking for odds and ends and bonus grazing spots, trying to avoid being stuffed full of any one thing.

Only rarely does the thought emerge, "You know, I'd like to take a very long time out and not check the news for the next year or two."  That's tantamount to treason for the inquisitive, right up there with the infamous "to be or not to be" question.  Curiosity -- the hunger to know -- demands sating, even if one has been packed to the gills and overfed on a dish or two.

Trick question: How do you offset the whirlwinds, windmills, and tornadoes of lies from a Republican presidential candidate, running mate, and from all members of their party -- people who hate 'Gummint,' want to drown it in a bathtub, yet are desperate, just dying to run the whole show, including YOUR life?

Trick answer:  You bring in bigger, bolder, brighter, and broader lies for distraction and comparative perspective -- you bring in religion and other such long-inflamed sores and assorted soreheads for diversion.

Now, before you light up like the Griswold's house finally does in National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation," imperiling resources at the regional nuclear plant, most people -- even your idiot servant here -- acknowledge some creative force in the universe larger than themselves.

Anyone else plagued by a persistent, deep foreboding... the sense that the fix is in?

This sensation's become the occasional, droning companion to my thoughts, a mosquito I can hear but somehow not quite swat.  It is not yet an epic tale, but it feels like we're getting there, we're getting there.

Closest I can come to explaining the goose-bumped phenomenon:  It's akin to The Feeling That Descended Like a Cloud of Ice Fog in 2000, when SCOTUS suspended the Constitution, and Our Democracy, and installed its own choice of president to power.

We yawned, shrugged, scratched, stretched, and embraced that decision -- which should have been cause for another round of hair-raising alerts.  It was suddenly clear that we would accept anything.

Eighty big corporate CEOs are issuing joint statements through Murdoch's Wall Street Journal about the dangers from Congressional inaction on the fiscal 'crisis'. They talk down the economy, they are making announcements about layoffs, highlighting below expectation earnings, and generally spreading panic based on Congressional inaction on the 'fiscal cliff'.

Just before the election, coincidence?  Probably not. Nothing about the 'fiscal cliff' requires immediate action, they aren't laying off people because of it, if they are really laying off people at all. Demand creates jobs, not corporate CEOs.

It doesn't matter what the 'lame duck' Congress or the President does right now about any of 'fiscal cliff' items. The Republicans demanded it be set up this way, when they were holding the country hostage over the debt ceiling.

.. If it makes any difference at all, it's probably not the Halloween stuff at the stores and at home, even though the kids always go nuts for this "creep out" stuff.  More and more adults, too, looks like -- some say it's the second-biggest holiday of the year, if not THE biggest.

Ca-Ching, goes the cash register, and another angel costume gets its wings bent, straight out of the box -- isn't that how that one goes, from that "It's a Dunderheaded Life" movie they always play this time of year?

Sorry, I know what it's really called, it's just that life has pretty weird lately, and you know how we always joked around about movie titles, like the...

The original Twilight Zone series had a timely episode involving a kind of a stopwatch:  Click the stem, and all time stops.  Except you.  Maybe you're already hearing the tell-tale series music and its four-note loop.

40-year-old Patrick McNulty realized the stopwatch offered many intriguing possibilities, if its secrets could be unwound.  In the teleplay by series creator Rod Serling, the [spoiler alert] watch is dropped and broken -- forever stranding McNulty in time.

Except for that being-stranded-in-time part, I could have long used a stopwatch like that.  (You too?)  It sure would have shrunk down those 75-hour weeks to size.