Recent Entries
Bump - Friday, Aug. 24, 2007
Back Roads - Friday, May. 25, 2007
Next to Last - Monday, May. 21, 2007
My New Business - Wednesday, Mar. 21, 2007
Lessons in Stone - Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007
Favorite Reads
unclebob
batten
jen7
weetabix
hulamoons
Kathmccall
rubyfoxx
nixtress
waterlu
sixweasels
Friday, Feb. 28, 2003
You know, this is a really crappy time of the year.

I�m talking about weather, weather with freezing rain and snow and ice on roads which instantly transforms the mundane act of driving to the store/bank/bar into a mechanized highwire act, complete with other contestants who have no earthly business being out on the road even when it�s sunny and dry. And gloomy? Those overcast 12 hour days? If I wanted to live in Finland I guess I�d just pack up the brood and go. Don�t bring it here to me.

I�m talking about no baseball, no football, no fishing. Watching tall black men in shorts and bad tattoos chase an orange ball doesn�t do much for me. Watching stocky white men with no front teeth skim around a refrigerated garage does even less. Seeing large cars go around in a circle can be fun for a while, but just exactly how many times can one get excited about a left hand turn?

I�m talking about having to wear a coat. Gloves. Boots. About looking at swimming pools in backyards that no sane being would set foot in.

This really crappy time of year also comes in a year that is starting out to be especially crappy.

I mean, it doesn�t take too much imagination or thought to put reality in focus. We�re about to start lobbing big things that go boom at a nutcase in Iraq who seems to believe that sacrificing his own people in the name of righteousness just might be a sound domestic policy. We�re getting ready to send our kids over there to shoot at him, hoping against all odds that he doesn�t shoot back. We�ve got an economy in the tank. We�ve got gas prices that make you wonder if it wouldn�t be cheaper to just bite the bullet and go ahead with that horse and wagon idea you had as a child.

Best of all, it�s tax time. We get to be reminded of just how much dough we spend to let all this stuff happen for yet another year.

So in the interest of taking action, in the interest of not letting all this bad stuff slide, I�m willing to take a stand. To lend a hand so to say. I�m ready for it, I�ve spent enough time in the recliner, I�ve learned all I�m ever going to learn from the History Channel and Tom Clancey and the Dennis Miller Show. If someone in Washington DC can just put me up for a week we�ll be all set. Because it might be frantic, it might be ugly, but a terrible justice is about to be visited on our land, our world. The swift sword of corrective action.

I�m ready to be King.

It won�t take very long, mind you. I won�t need to hold the job for years or even months.

I�m more of a short and sweet kinda lad. With steel toed shoes and an agenda.

1. Iraq? This isn�t as much of a problem as it�s being made out to be. Since all our energy is being expended at removing one dictator on a power trip, why not do just that and remove him? You can�t tell me that with the sort of technology we posses, the kind that can make a TV as flat as a matchbook or use a satellite to take pictures of somebody on a bass boat in the middle of nowhere, technology that makes all manner of things possible, that we can�t couple that with a few stealthy SEAL�s and hijack this dude away in the middle of the night. We can. Put him on a plane and drop him off in Leavenworth with the rest of the attitude problems. Then send Ted Turner over there to run the place. I understand he�s not too busy these days.

2. Gas prices? I hear Iraq has plenty of oil. Ted, send some over while you�re at it. But long term, we�re probably not going to need it for very much longer. Your new King will take the entire Ford Motor Company and order them to produce a working hydrogen engine for cars. An affordable one. In two years everyone will have a new car with a nice clean hydrogen engine anyway, since. . .

3. King Outfoxed is going to shut down the IRS. That�s right. Walk in there and padlock the place. The whole country is going on a flat tax system, a 15% deal on everybody over the age of 21 and every business, too. No more loopholes, no need to panic come April 15. No more state taxes, no more sales tax. I mean, they get away with that already in Florida, for crying out loud. And the beauty of it is, it will take about 5 people to run the whole tax system since your King will set up a dozen linked Cray computers to handle it all. Probably put them in the IRS building. Or maybe the GAO building, since I�m going over there and clean up that rathole too. Everybody that works there now can look forward to a new job. Quite possibly at Ford Motor, since they�ll be hiring.

4. Politicians? A thing of the past. You�ll get your say in Town Meetings. You�ll get to vote at home on any and every issue via the Internet. Since the dozen Crays will likely be coasting along on the new easy tax thingy, we�ll set them up to tabulate the votes. I�ll have the janitor make the announcements at the end of the day, I�m sure he won�t mind. I�ll just go ahead and turn all those Senate Office Buildings and Congress into spiffy museums, that should satisfy the art crowd.

5. I�d pass out one time grants of, oh, say $200,000 to anyone who wanted to have a working farm and grow food. With the money we�d be saving out of all those ex-government employees, I think we could end any food shortage problems we might be having.

6. Your King would call up the Prime Minister of Canada and have him send down his team of experts to explain how, just exactly how Canada manages to offer health care for next to nothing to every citizen. Better than that, they wouldn�t have to explain. They�d just need to start the same freaking thing here! Right now!

7. Everybody would have to buy a copy of the new Steely Dan CD, which is due out on May 6th by the way. This probably wouldn�t please everyone, but it would sure make me happy. Think of it as a small way to say thanks for lowering your taxes and getting you better health care. Plus, they make great tunes, they�re irreverent, and they could possibly use the cash.

8. 4 day work weeks. Mandatory. It can be done. Again, we do have the technology, and life is supposed to be easy, so why not just admit to ourselves that we can get our shit done in 4 days and be done with it? Plus, you�ll need the extra day or two to spend all that money you�re going to have. Your local bartender will be so pleased.

9. Teachers, educators, police and fire, armed forces? Pay raises. �Nuff said.

10. All lawyers would need to spend the last year of their college education working on a construction site with Stu. Without pay. That ought to just about free them of any lurking ideas they might have about how their moral agenda is so much more palatable than the rest of the working world. And they�d learn how to build stuff to boot.

Having set out to fix the major problems, and by also outlawing telephone solicitors, door to door Jehovah�s Witnesses and a handful of other minor annoyances, I�ll gracefully retire as King. No kidding. I�m not going to hang around DC just for the hell of it. Maybe I�ll let Colin Powell be King for a while. I think he�d be just the sort of guy to keep the ball rolling.

Don�t even think I�m not serious.

previous - next 0 comments so far