Boy, can I whine with the best of them or what? I hope I at least do it in an entertaining manner. But it’s still the case that I am in dire need of funds, so any little bit you can contribute will get a huge thanks from me.That being said, I do hope someday to have a bit left over. And you know what I’m going to buy with it? A freaking connector for my car so I can play my portable cd player in it. I used to have one that used the cassette player in my car (there was this thing you put into the cassette player that you attached to the speaker connector of the cd player, and you could hear your cds), but it was in the glove compartment when that car got repossessed, and after that I didn’t have a car so there was no need to replace the connector. My ex-fiancé had this thing that used a signal from the radio to connect your cd player with the speakers in the car. That would work for me, as the old radio I have in my current jalopy does have a cassette player, but it stopped working. I don’t know if they make anything like that anymore — everything seems to have gone iPod nowadays. Well, I do have a Creative Zen MP3 player I bought a couple of years ago — that means 100 years ago in electronic toys terms.
I need something like this because the radio is driving me crazy. Radio sucks in Orlando. We have two rock stations — one “classic” rock (the same two ZZ Top and AC/DC songs they’ve been playing for over thirty years now), and one “modern” rock, which means endless repeats of Staind and that other band that sounds like Staind. If you’re lucky — most of the time it’s nothing but mindless pseudo-raunchy deejay patter, where the level of discourse is such as to make one long for the days when the high intellectual stylings of Howard Stern ruled the airwaves. And what is it with the death of the “radio voice”? Everyone on radio (and on tv — just try to listen to Chris Matthews or Greta Van Whatserface’s hideous voices without your ears starting to bleed) sounds not only like their favorite pastime is gargling broken glass, but they all seem to affect these reeely, reeely, like, yuh know, aged Valleygirl/guy speech patterns. No wonder Obama’s been able to sway millions with his disjointed clichés; the man does have a golden voice. It’s a conspiracy, or something.
PS: since I’m being paranoid, why do I get the feeling that come post-Election Day and the revelation that Obama’s hypnotic campaign didn’t work and we elected someone else to be president who had some sort of background in something other than nodding at his wife’s and pastor’s crazy rants — why do I get the feeling that there are going to be riots in the “inner cities”? This worries me just a tad, because I get to drive through a portion of that so-called “inner city” to get to work. There are an awful lot of Obama bumper stickers there. This isn’t racist, this is just an observance of the fact that the media have built this guy up to be the Second Coming on very flimsy evidence beyond the fact that he’s young, skinny (only the news media would make up something as off-the-wall as a supposed “fear of skinny people” on the part of the Hefty-American class; in other words, project much, news nuggets? It’s the news people that fear and hate fat people, which is why anyone running for president better have a workout regimen stricter than a Romanian gymnast’s, and why we’ll never elect anyone fatter than Bill Clinton (and he put most of the weight on in office) ever again), and of course of the approved “not white” color. His “ideas” are the usual ephemeral lite-beer foam, and would have been roundly mocked if they had come from any paleface candidate.
But the media do this all the time. They build things up out of nothing, and flog the story until they’ve made it seem like the most important event in world history, and then they are surprised when the shit hits the fan. For example, remember the O.J. trial? Of course you do — even if you avoided all televised and radioed mentions of it you had all your co-workers, who could talk of nothing else, driving you nuts. Or at least I did. But at base, was it really that important that a washed-up football player who had a few stints of lame acting under his belt may or may not have killed his wife? Well, one surprising, and even shocking thing I did learn was that lots of black people still remembered who he was.
And then there were the Rodney King riots… which I am convinced happened because the news media treated King like the Christ Child, just because his routine (for LA cops, anyway) beatdown got captured on videotape. And then there is something a little closer to my experience — the Miami Riots of 1980, which pushed back my high school graduation one week because the city was in lockdown. Not that I cared, but I did live just off 27th Avenue, which a few miles north of my neighborhood went straight through Liberty City. While all the “fun” was going on we would go stand on the street corner and look up the street (most Miami streets are very straight and long, and Miami is very flat) at the huge column of black smoke that were the remains of businesses and homes. This all blew up because the cops killed a guy they caught speeding on a motor cycle, and as he happened to be black and the cops happened to be white, the news media blew it up into a big racial thing. The media made sure to carefully note whenever they could that the jury was all white. Be that as it may, the cops should have gotten the book thrown at them — but guess who the prosecutor was? None other than Janet Reno, who as you well know went on to a brilliant career of convincing kids to accuse their parents of being Satanic child rapists, and then became Bill Clinton’s chief burner of weirdos (if you think Democrats will protect you for being a weirdo, the Waco affair should have been your first clue; leftists hate non-conformists way more than supposed rightwing fascists do — for one thing, rightwing fascists are often believing Christians, and one thing Christians are supposed to do is to recognize that they are no better than any other sinner; leftists have no such inhibitions).
Anyway, this is all just to say, beware: the media does this sort of thing all the time. Expect lots of post-riot pseudo-agony along the lines of “where has America gone wrong?” and so forth, but look for the note of glee under all the anguished expressions. It will be there.
