Through the Looking Glass…


As one trained in mathematics, I always admired the way Lewis Caroll’s mind worked. How amazingly creative, I thought. It was wondrous to me that he could so easily conjure up a parallel universe where down was up and up was down.


I suspect if you live long enough, you get to experience everything.
But I must admit what I’ve experienced in the last four years, has my head shaking from side to side like one of those wobblies you stick in the back of the window.
If you had told me a dozen years ago that life really does imitate art and that I would be thrust into Lewis Caroll’s world of “Alice” I never would have believed it.
Yet, that’s precisely where I find myself in America today.

It’s almost like that Captain Kirk program where he travels back to his old home and everything looks the same but it is really another dimension in a parallel universe. Well, that’s how America looks to me these days.

If I were an active investor, right now I would be selling my Disney stock. Why?
. Why spend all that money to go to a theme park when you already inhabit one? The trouble is that a lot of us don’t know it yet; but, don’t worry, “we will!” sayeth the wise man. For sure enough, just like giving a uncontrolled lunatic a credit card with an unlimited credit limit and a penchant for saying anything to get his way, you encourage chaos to the nth degree. Only, it’s not a free ride. One day all of the bills will come due. And somebody will start asking questions like “How the heck did we ever get ourselves into this mess?”

The truth is that somewhere along the line, I must have slipped down the rabbit hole. I don’t know precisely when this event happened but it must have been after I saw the way this Supreme Court elected the supreme resident. And after that instead of acting humble and trying to bring people together as he promised, he started enacting radical legislation. That must have been the time I first blacked out. What I discovered upon coming to was that Mr. Caroll had it all figured out in advance. What seventy five years ago was thought of as novelty, today passes for fact in present day America. We have two-dimensional mean-spirited cartoon characters calling the shots. What a canard foisted on those who think they are supporting patriots. There’s Mad Hatter Cheney and his colleague Zel, to Chesire Cat Andrew Card. We even have the nasty queen a role that is natural for the White Haired Queen Mother whose surrounded by a husband and son who have the verbal presence of Elmer Fudd.

The only thing wrong is that there’s no free lunch; no picnic dejour. In this version of “Through the looking glass,”we all get to pay. Think I’m wrong?. Check out our generous government that will see to it that your government Social Security will go into private hands if given their way. And that the cost of your medicine will elevate your blood pressure so that you will need more medication.

We should have gotten the message early with his Cabinet appointments but we didn’t. If the word rang out, choose the candidate who is categorically unfit for the assignment, it would have been a bulls eye each and every time. That should have told us something. Christy Whitman was probably best qualified even though Bush wouldn’t listen to her and finally fired her for having her own mind. Foolish lady!

You can’t help but think about Through the Looking Glass scenarios when you listen to the bleating of these Right Wing Hawks who never served a day in their lives yet they belittle Kerry’s performance in hostile territory. It’s just a matter of waiting for the tea to be served.

What’s wrong with this picture?

But let me clue you in folks. Caroll knew what he was talking about; in fact, he was prophetic. The bottom line is that this government operates on bottom lines. It’s not about people. Goodness and all that rot! It’s about how much is in it for me and my friends. These guys are ‘reverse talkers’ and would earn a spot on Seinfeld. They say one thing but they mean something quite different. Consider that they talk about clean air while they dump toxins into the environment. Not just a slight blip on the honesty meter but a 180 turn-around. But the thing here is that this is not just a slight mistake but intentional. And it’s endemic through virtually every piece of legislation that these jokers have signed. For example, they talk about the benefits of energy while they go about building a case for coal, a form of fuel that was associated with lung disease and other ailments for generations. They talk about antimissile shields but they don’t have a system that works…and probably never will have using the present technology. Nevertheless, they will pump $264 billion into it.
Can you imagine a CEO beginning with a project that doesn’t work, has no expectation of ever working and yet they continue to invest the companies hard-earned resources into it? I can’t. That CEO would last perhaps through one annual meeting.

Their perverse views that do damage to the truth are felt everywhere; no stone has been left unturned. They talk about preserving the Wetlands while they ready legislation to encourage development. They talk about protecting our national parks while they encourage logging trails that have ripped through the pristine wilderness and will take generations to repair. They talk about our friends and allies in this Iraq War when in truth the US accounts for ninety per-cent of the heavy lifting and the casualties. They talk about helping us get jobs at the same time they are writing trade contracts to move jobs to foreign nations. They tell us about all of the jobs this administration’s created while in truth this government will operate at a net loss. What they don’t say is that the jobs created were assumed by incoming minorities because they are all part-time and minimum wage.

They talk about lowering the unemployment rate while in truth they leave out all of those who have simply given up looking for jobs. They count the wounded but leave out those for each of the services who count theirs separately. The tell us that inflation is down but they don’’t include food or energy in the totals any longer. What do we get out of all this.
Their perspective of the world is to tell us what they think we want to hear while they go on their merry way doing precisely as they like. What difference, asks the Mad Hatter? It’s only words. We tell them up, but we mean down. And the Queen, party top the deception, giggles along….These people would be laughable if they weren’t playing a mortal game with the lives of the young and the futures of our best and brightest.

We are told that we are going to war because the enemy has WMD, that they have uranium and a weapons program that could have them launch their weapons in under forty five minutes. Too bad that none of that is true. But nobody seems to do anything about it so they keep going on. Just like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland. Things get curioser and curioser.

It’s a strange phenomena to see how it’s okay for the government to lie to us again and again, but that Clinton was not allowed a single slip-up in what most of us would agree had nothing to do with government.. All of our moral outrage to the tune of 50 million dollars of tax-payer money was expended to find out if Clinton committed a lie. Now, Bush lies like a rug and everyone pounds their chests and think he is doing a great job. It’s simply a matter of telling your lies long enough and frequently enough while you stand in front of the flag and talk about God and everyone will buy into it. Are we truly that stupid? For the very few of us who see beyond the obvious antics of this deceptive band of charlatans who are laughing all the way to the bank, the question that keeps rising in our craw is whether the people in this country, today, really deserve to have a democracy. Perhaps we would be better off recognizing our obligation to Lewis Caroll, inaugurate our Queen, kiss up to the Madd Hatter and get on with it. We already have the Pied Piper who is happily leading us to our collective doom. Maybe, enthralled by our cartoon cast, we need to think about our Deux Ex Machina, Superman, who will come from dying Krypton and help us restore truth, honesty and the American way. Otherwise, there’s always the next Extinction.