Outside the street’s on fire
in a real death waltz
Between what’s flesh
and what’s fantasy
In an effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, I read now that the Pentagon and maybe the CIA are planting stories in the Iraqi press about how good the war is going. Iraqi journalists are being bought and bribed and the propaganda machine seems to be in full swing.
And here I was, under the illusion that one of the tenets of democracy was a free press.
Meanwhile another eighty five more Americans died in Iraq in the month of November. I don’t think the powers that be report the number of injured or maimed American personnel and the civilian death toll from suicide bombers and the like just seem like an afterthought.
And the poets down here
don’t write nothing at all,
they just stand back
and let it all be
Here in the States, people will be clamoring for investigations and threatening that heads will soon roll. For me, that music sounds hauntingly familiar. I think that only one or two lower ranking people wound up taking the fall for that debacle and the brass higher up were either reassigned or got off scot-free.
Come on, this isn't Jennifer Anniston we're talking about.
Such is our attention span
And in the quick of the night
they reach for their moment
and try to make an honest stand
but they wind up wounded,
not even dead
Tonight
in
Jungleland
On personal note, I just received word from my doctor that my bad cholesterol is still about a hundred points too high. It should be around seventy or eighty but I registered an off the map one hundred eighty one. They’ve quadrupled my dosage of Lipitor and want to check under the hood again in three months if the numbers don’t start to come down.
Christmas, that’s right, Christmas, not “the holidays” or some other politically correct term, is fast approaching. So far, I’ve been struggling to get in the mood and I’m finding it hard to get in the spirit of things.
A good friend of mine who runs a loan operation shop for small business’s solicits donations throughout the year from employee’s and customer’s alike. He does his own personal version of the Toys for Tots program and he asked if me and Anna would like to join them in shopping for presents and the wrapping them up this Sunday.
At first I declined. After all, my beloved New York Giants were taking on the hated Dallas Cowboys in a battle for supremacy in the NFC East. The winner has a damn good shot of a guaranteed spot in the playoffs.
If it makes me (and any of you feel any better), I might be re-thinking my strategy.
I'll take a shot at redemption, no matter how small, wherever I can find it.
Note: After writing this I flipped over to CNN to get my dose of the news. It seems another ten Marines were killed another eleven injured when they were on foot patrol and an explosive device was detonated nearby.
December is not looking any better.
(Lyrics lifted from Bruce Springsteen’s fine tune “Jungleland” from the album Born to Run)