Off the Deep End

This started out to be one of those posts in which I list a smattering of the manifold reasons to be sure that America has gone completely off the deep end. Let's see where it winds up.

This woman, Nadya Suleman, has arranged to bring forth onto this continent 14 more babies, with help from someone who went all the way through medical school. Instead of getting the emotional assistance she so clearly requires, she is now a fixture on the nightly entertainment tv shows, replacing the late Princess Di and Anna Nicole Smith. She's even been dubbed with the amusing sobriquet "OctoMom," and she would so pleased to hear that you think she greatly resembles Angelina Jolie.

The recent Rihanna/Chris Brown unpleasantness still is aboil in many hearts. Oprah broke her neck to butt into it all, warning (wisely) that "he'll do it again." Polls of teenagers, the group from which those two entertainers draw the vast lion's share of their fans, show an unbelievable tendency for young people - male and female - to blame the female victim of couple violence because "she was asking for it." Now comes the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez, claiming that the result of the feminist movement is that attitude that women sometimes deserve to be brutally beaten by men. After all, says Ms Lopez, the feminist movement made women masculine and men feminine, and therefore Chris Brown just had to lay the smack down, she posits, in the magazine launched by jut-jawed pop-eyed madman William F. Buckley.

Crazy? You be the judge. Or at least, the jury.

Fourteen people get onboard a small plane with a load capacity of ten people. The plane crashes.

The crew of a Fed Ex cargo plane, loaded with highly flammable cargo, goes against the advice of Japanese air traffic control and tries to land in Japan during a severe windshear. Crash, burn, two more fatalities.

A man in Oakland, CA, wanted on a warrant and pulled over for a traffic stop, is "afraid of going back to jail, and mad at his parole officer," so he shoots four police officers. This parolee, with a criminal history that would take quite a while for my slow-speed printer to print out, was driving around with an AK-47 assault rifle. The NRA would defend his right to do so. They would stop, of course, at defending his right to shoot four police. They know there is a difference between his 2nd Amendment rights and the 6th Commandment, by cracky. The difference is, arithmetically, four. Four police. One supposes that the gunman was on his way to a meeting of his well-regulated militia when he just had to defend himself on the streets of Oakland. Let's just remember that he might not have been armed if not for the Constitutional vigilance of those NRA people...people whose wisdom infuses the very marrow of our American existence...people such as Charlton Heston and Tom Selleck.

No need to wonder why I keep photos of our greatnieces and greatnephew around. I like to look at them and bask in the warmth of their pure, pure love. Some days, I need it more than others.