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a toast to absurdity

a toast to absurdity

This is all I have to say about last night's dinner: The tiramasu was fantastic. The dinner itself was nice and we generally had a pleasant time. But my stomach turns when I think about my sister marrying that guy. And the whole hypocrisy of last night's dinner....eh, I'll talk about it some other time.

A year ago this week, I was planning my father's surprise birthday party on New Year's Eve. The world at that time was a relatively sane place. My main political worry was facing life with George Bush, Jr. as my leader. Had I been able to see a newspaper from this week, I would have laughed and thought none of it was possible. Is it me or has the news taken on a very absurd tone? I mean, I know the seriousness of the situation, but every time I read about shoe checks at airports, I have to stifle the desire to laugh. It's almost surreal. Sample headline: Security Reviewing Traveler's Shoes. Now doesn't this seem a bit like closing the barn door after the cow has run away? Are we not seeing the forest for the trees? One person decided to hide a bomb in his shoe, so now all the concentration of airlines' already lame security is focused on shoes. Anyone checking bodily cavities? I'm thinkin that with all the publicity these shoe searches are getting, any plans to sneak another shoe bomb on will be scrapped in favor of something else.

And more surrealism. Sample headline #2: Police to be armed with radiation sensor during New Year's Eve celebration. This seems like something out of a 1950's sci fi novel. Cops walking around with radiation detectors? With one million people in Times Square on New Year's Eve, what are they going to do if one of those detectors goes off? Quietly move a thousand or so people to another area? Not likely. If one of those babies goes off and the cops therefore have to alert the reveler's in that vicinity, panic will ensue. There's not much room to move when there are a million people packed into one tight area. And then what? How do you run from radiation? My guess is you don't. I think these $1,400 detectors are just another band-aid on a severed limb, something to make you feel like action is being taken and you are safe. Like shoe searches, only more technologically advanced.

And then we have bin Laden, live on tape. Is anyone paying attention to him any more? The first time he was on the news talking, right after the bombing started, people were rapt with attention, hanging on his every word. He was frightening and chilling. Now, he has become like grandpa in the nursing home who tells the same stories over and over, and you wonder how much of it happened in his head and how much is real. And honestly, I'm wondering if there wasn't a series of tapes made a while ago to be dispersed at intervals, and bin Laden is either already dead in a cave somewhere, or in another country far removed from war, looking every bit like the Westeners he says he despises.

Yep. The world has changed a lot in the past year. I've become almost amused by the way things are reported now, the stretches some media type people take to make a story where none exists, to turn a non-event into major news, to find something riveting in a rather boring war. The day I saw on my television Geraldo Rivera standing in the middle of a war zone I knew this war had reached its absurdity level. Actually, it got worse the next day when someone referred to Geraldo as a journalist.

I did have a point. But I forgot what it was. Which is ok, because I don't have time to write anymore. I'm on vacation until Wedensday and I have a lot of new video games to get through before then.

Comments

oh shit, m, does that mean they're gonna be able to detetct the kryptonite butt plug mk 17 i had installed last week? Shit, I was just getting used tot hat beautiful feeling too.

The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. by online poker sites

Shouldn't I join the ranks of academic philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn't I stop trying to do some science and keeping my head down? Indeed not. by poker tables