g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, June 23, 2004
21:04 - This is reeeeally starting to wear on me

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On our way in to the grocery store just now, KCBS News was broadcasting a glowing report about Kerry's campaign speeches in the Bay Area. "We need a President who understands that America never goes to war when it wants to—only when it has to." Random (I'm sure) bystanders were interviewed. "He's on a roll!"

And as we exited the store, KCBS was relaying early exit interviews with theatergoers. Which movie they saw was never in question; KCBS didn't even feel the need to tell us. Just that "some people" had characterized it "more as an op-ed than a documentary." And that every single person coming out of the theater was simply, meltingly, overjoyed with it. "It's FAN...tastic," one said. "It's the best thing I've seen since... I don't know, Gone with the Wind." Then the impartial announcer gave us to understand that people left the theater knowing things they hadn't before, such as that the President remained in that classroom after being told that the second plane had hit, finishing up his meeting with those third-graders, that once-in-a-lifetime event that they were supposed to be enjoying, and utterly failed to leap up and scream at the top of his lungs that America is under attack! and immediately launch nukes, or whatever Moore wishes us to believe would be better than calmly giving at least one classroomful of grade-schoolers another seven minutes of life in a nation at peace.

This is why I haven't had KCBS on in my car for some years now, let alone NPR. This is what now passes for impartial evening news reporting. And now that I only hear it on the occasions when I'm in someone else's car, it just seems all the more a voice from another planet—one where 9/11 never happened, and where all our biggest problems today are caused by the man in the Oval Office, and everybody knows it. It's such a foregone conclusion as to no longer even bear discussion.

It's beating me down. I'm already tired after a long day at work, after getting up at 7:30 to walk the dog who's decided that the Summer Solstice should be celebrated by micturating as close to sunrise as possible. I do not need more of this crap. I do not need to be reminded that the chances appear to be lessening that this country will treat terrorism as the primary issue of the day, rather than a President they've determined to hate no matter what he does.

November's election will decide whether 9/11 has, in fact, slipped out of the attention span of the American public, and has reduced itself to the subject of bemusement and sarcastic cliché; but Fahrenheit 9/11 is a precursor to it, and its box-office success will tell us just how fervently America wants to simply erase 9/11 from history, like throwing out the highest and lowest grades in the curve to eliminate statistical outliers, and focus primarily and solely on electing the President they feel would do a better job in a peacetime America that has never known terrorism and never will again.

As Lance put it, fear and fury fade—but adolescent resentment of authority figures only grows. Bitter, self-centered chafing against The Man.

Bush is The Man now. Bin Laden stopped being The Man a long time ago. And America doesn't want to hear otherwise.

I'd weep if I had the energy.

UPDATE: Aargh! Now Comedy Central is blaring Michael Moore on The Daily Show! 11:00! across South Park.

Could someone please come get me when this is over?


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© Brian Tiemann