George W. Bush's Semen Drenches Crime Scene

The George W. Bush Presidential Center dedication ceremony occurred April 24^th, 2013. The center includes a library and museum. In lockstep with the dedication come numerous editorials, columns and blogs taking the rectal temperature of George W. Bush Junior’s legacy to date. Of course, the centerpiece of the conversation is the lingering fumes of the Iraq War.

I’d like to clang my cymbals on the subject and hope my notes transcend the ruckus of noise instigated by the sophomoric glut of critics Bush Jr. has rustled since 2000. I’m going to refrain from picking the low hanging fruit and suggest that GWB’s presidential library is populated with pop-up books or joke that only a single copy of See Jack Run is available for check-out. On the other hand, perhaps a guided tour of the museum portion of the center features heaps of Iraqi civilian wax-figure corpses or tape-looped footage of Colin Powell pumping the United Nation’s snatch-wacker in lea of yanking the rip cord on Shock and Awe.

I’ll grant George W. Bush Jr. the benefit of the doubt and assume that he and his cohorts honestly believed that Saddam Hussein and his cohorts harbored weapons of mass destruction, and colluded with Al-Qaida. For the sake of this post I’ll concede that Colin Powell’s evidence of Iraq’s clandestine war machine and terrorist ties, as presented to the United Nations pre-war, was not fabricated to persuade the world to purchase a ticket for the war ride.

Regardless, no weapons of mass destruction were unearthed and no bonds to terrorists were exposed.

Ten years after the invasion of Iraq the numbers have crossed the ticker: 4,486 US soldiers are dead and 116,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Nevermind that the cost of the war equals $2.2 trillion in 2013 and will cost $3.9 trillion in 2052 adjusted for interest.

Now THAT is a helluva mistake!

Actually, sounds more like manslaughter. George W. Bush’s honest misstep resulted in 120,486 deaths.

A few years ago a Pittsburgh-area man didn’t secure his truck’s hitch properly and his load dislodged on Route 8 and struck a van, killing a family. The perpetrator was rightfully charged with manslaughter and punished. One of his repayments to society was to honor a judge’s order—the man was sentenced to hang a photo of the dead family on his living room wall as a chronic reminder of his transgression. The punishment seems harsh at first blush, but a family is now dead due to the man’s oversight.

Why is the Commander-In-Chief of the United States of America not held to a similar standard? Where are the manslaughter charges? George W. Bush is clearly guilty on 120,486 counts.

In a just system a judge would’ve ordered a construction crew to build a hallway on the Texas ranch. The hallway would subsequently be decorated with a headshot of every life snuffed as a result of an honest mistake. Install a single toilet at the opposing end of the hallway so whenever the convicted cowboy needs to drop a deuce he’d be relegated to mosey by two miles of the frozen stares of the slaughtered.

Sounds like a fair punishment in accord with precedent.

Before the construction crew clocks out, they might as well add an addition wing to the ranch to accommodate the war wounded. Dick Cheney can spoon-feed the paralyzed, scratch the itches of the amputees and read bedtime stories to the orphans.

"Nowadays" Humankind Is Not More Violent; Keep Fighter Jets Away From Emperor Caligula

The recent Boston Marathon bombings have rightly awakened throngs of dozing social critics. However, I grit my teeth whenever someone grumbles a cliché like "nowadays people are more violent."  

Literature exists explaining why humankind is considerably less violent today than at any point in history. Evolution dictates that humankind strives toward a peaceful existence. Survival of the fittest is a voided concept if nobody survives. However, as humankind evolves technology advances in kind. Weapons become more destructive.

Although the world's population of rabble-rousers shrinks, and becomes better contained, those remaining possess greater potential to wreak more widespread and devastating havoc. Imagine the consequences if Emperor Caligula, and only he, had commanded squadrons of F-16 fighter jets. What if Genghis Khan had controlled ballistic missiles tipped with chemical weapons? Outfit Hitler with a vast fleet of nuclear submarines and most of civilization would've been rubble and soot before Uncle Sam wiped the crust from his eyes. To avoid a future asteroid belt forming between Venus and Mars modern weaponry needs withheld from the dwindling few of those with a grudge and a spastic trigger finger. Hiccups will inevitably occur. The Boston Marathon bombing was a sad and grisly hiccup.

Not that "nowadays people are more violent," rather the violent possess more firepower.    

When the Moon Comes To Call

When I was a toddler the moon scared me witless. I hated going outside after sundown on a cloudless night. The moon was a massive shimmering face hovering amid the pitch black void. He was motionless, sure, but could lunge at any moment. His expression seemed tranquil, of course, but he was long to gnash his teeth. If I absolutely had to be outside on a moonlit night I'd run from beneath the security of a roof to the nearest asylum. No matter how fast I moved I could never outpace the moon. Even travelling 55 mph in the backseat of the family station wagon was an impotent crack at escape. The moon followed me. He departed the Lycoming County Mall when I did, traveled at my exact pace west on Route 220, and arrived at 415 Woodside Avenue the exact second the car parked in the garage. He perched above while I darted to the front door. He lingered outside my bedroom window, glaring, until morning when the sun steered him back behind Eagle Mountain. "He sees you when you're sleeping." Yeah, and he knows when I'm awake too…sometimes he escapes the nighttime and appears DURING THE DAY.  

As I aged I understood that the moon was nothing but a giant boulder captured in the earth’s gravitation pull while it traveled ‘round and ‘round the globe—a kind of perfectly controlled chaos dictated by physics. The moon did not glow itself; the lunar surface reflected the sun’s rays. The face was not a face at all, rather craters arranged in such a way to deceive a young child into believing a cheerless pair of eyes surveyed ones’ every move. (The human brain is programmed by biology to recognize faces in random patterns, you see.) The moon did not follow me—instead I was fooled by an optical illusion. What was once an ominous watchdog in the heavens had become a darn rock. I played with rocks in the driveway; the moon was just bigger and higher up.

A thought occurred to me recently on a cloudless night when the moon was nowhere to be seen. What if I've been wrong for the last 30+ years? What if the moon IS a monster? What if he's everything I thought he was when I was a child? What if he finally outpaced the car and caught up with me? Shit! What if that explains his absence in the sky? What if he’s come to harvest this faithless child because I stopped believing in him? What if he's waiting for me right now, poised behind the bushes with a carving knife? What if he’s hiding in my closet with piano wire measured to fit the circumference of an adult neck? What if he’s come to lead me by the hand to the rusty meat hook? What if he doesn’t come to call tonight, but he isn’t in the sky again tomorrow and all the “what ifs?” ricochet about my head every night until no nights remain?

No Matt, it’s just a rock. Just a darn rock.