Well, we finished our taxes. Just in time too---and oddly enough, we're getting something back, we should have sent it out months ago. I just wasn't absolutely sure what to do about stock options, having cashed some before the bottom dropped out of the stock market, and received two different bits of advice. So we went the safer route, and am now ready to send it off...
I'm becoming my father, little by little, I suppose...he was always in that huge line at midnight of April the 15th in front of the post office. I can remember him, working on his taxes at the formal dinner table, the one we rarely used...
Brian was complaining the other day about the whole thing, why not just a national sales tax or something? But I didn't feel that way about it. Taxes have been a part of life ever since I've been around, and like the drone I am, I don't question it. It's going to be hard enough to pay for this war as it is....
I see there's going to be a meeting at "Ur of the Chaldees" of many Iraqi factions and the US authorities. Nicely symbolic that---Abraham's home town.
I have to grudgingly admit that this war, now virtually over, seems to be pretty much accomplishing what it set out to do....and has made a media star of the former Iraqi Minister of (Dis)Information....
I just worry about the long-term consequences. Whether we have quelled the more fanatical branches of Islam, or instead spawned a few thousand other Osamas to deal with...ten years down the road.
And I wish a day could go by without us threatening Syria...
Still...could my government actually know what it's doing...?
And why does it feel almost un-American to admit that...?
The news actually is concentrating on some murder in California...
What will the news networks do after the "high" of embedded journallists in combat...?
What will Fox News do? Will they keep up the marching bands with every news flash, the ultra-patriotic rhetoric? (They've always been that way, but during the war, they seemed to be on a new patriotic plateau...)
Personally, I've always trusted Fox News about as much as I do Al-Jezeera....and for much the same reasons; their bias is waaaaay too obvious. CNN seemed to be in the military's pocket, with all the embedded journalists, but they at least tried to be impartial, no matter how miserably they failed, and the effort counted for something with me. Fox and Al-Jeez didn't even try.
I'm just wondering if the news networks will lobby for another war...to feed the military-entertainment complex...
Well, Monica Lewinsky is coming...
....back...
....as the host of that new Fox show where all the guys are masked, and dating that gorgeous girl.
Remember when she was the great and pressing news item?
When the entire country depended on, and revolved around, whether Clinton lied---or not---about what the two of them did?
When the news networks had nothing better to discuss? When the Congress seemed obsessed by it?
It seems ridiculous, in retrospect.
Oh, wait...to some of us, it seemed ridiculous at the time....
Still, a bored and restless media is a dangerous thing....
Especially in eras where an hour's worth of news must be played on twenty-four-hour networks...
9-11 gave them, like many of us, a new focus. But ratings are ratings, and I fear a media that is bored and restless...
As I fear a military that is bored and restless...
And an Administration that talks about Syria's chemical weapons testing---even though Syria never signed any accord on chemical weapons testing, and thus, technically, isn't breaking any international law.
Am I a pessimist or a realist?
Both, maybe.