Dusty Trails

E'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DRIVING to Vegas today, sometime after I've endured some more physical therapy. Very Eddie Izzard, this doctor: Now I'm gonna crack your back! <CRACK!> Four places. Little apprehensive about leaving now that the wind has reversed direction: but we figure it's already burnt most of the stuff on this side of the Simi Hills, so it's unlikely to jump over the freeway then burn all the way up here.

Famous last words.

You [and I] can keep an eye on its progress Here, if you're interested. You won't be, I'm sure - but I will, and this is an easy way for me to find the link while I'm laptopping in LV.

We're going to a wedding this time, not to gamble. First Vegas wedding we've been to. I disqualify our own on account it was not so much a wedding as a marriage, held in the back of a cab in the Drive-Thru Tunnel Of Love. The same cab, I might add, that drove us from the airport to the Clark County Registry Office. By the time we'd obtained the marriage license, our driver was sitting at the front of the line. That is Romance for you, right there!

The mannie cometh this morning to inspect our kitchen cabinetry, which arrived Wednesday and is boxed across our kitchen space. They're not installing it yet, of course - have to wait another "7-10 business days" before they'll do that. Just goes on and on and oooooon, this. Delay gives them time to correct anything wrong with the delivered goods, they say.

Dangit, now I need to dig-out my suit. Where the hell'd I put it?...

Loge's Dance

4pm: Sat out back at work the other day, having a smoke, in the midst of a thunderstorm. Guy asks: "I'm not from around here. Is this rain normal?" Heck No!, says me, You kidding? September round here it's s'pposed to be real hot, like 80 degrees, but blowing a gale that sooks the moisture out your skin and propels the flames. This is fire season.

Sure enough, not two days later, on my goddamned birthday too, huge fires burning right now at both ends of town. The biggest one - the one to the west - has cast a ten-mile pall of smoke over the city, has jumped the 118 twice, is burning homes out on the Old Santa Susanna road that I normally drive to work, and is blazing and coursing the hills at the edge of town. That is the "Chatsworth" fire, because it began in Chatsworth, home of american porn, late this afternoon: the second fire there today, because the freeway was closed at 6am this morning too because of the first, which began around 3.45am. Out on the other side of town, the east side, there was a big fire there this afternoon too - in the town of Moorpark - which had cause some homes to be evacuated close by the college my son was at. He made it back here to work, but my wife is now trying to reach home. Already turned back from her regular route she has to travel all the way along the 101 and down the 23, see if she can get home that way.

The sky is thick with smoke and choppers; the wind is blowing to the south and to the east, blowing away from my quiet neighborhood right now, but that could change in a snap. We live at the northern edge of town, and partway east.

This time two years ago we were evacuated ourselves when the big bad Simi Valley fire came to the end of our street.

11pm Patty says, in commments, "So maybe 'Chatsworth' in Hebrew is 'Sodom'?" I ought to answer "We'll find out gomorrah", but some puns are too awful.

So here's the deal. The fire began just over the hill in Chatsworth, which is the north-western border of the San Fernando Valley - The Valley, as in "Valley girl" - which stretches forty-odd miles east and twenty-odd miles south in a humungous densely-populated strip. It's like Los Angeles' hairpiece. The fire. other hand, has not touched Chatsworth itself, but has rather spread southward and westward over the mountains and canyons of Santa Susanna that form the eastern and southern walls of Simi Valley, where I live. They aren't especially tall mountains, but they are extremely rugged, steep, and brimming with new-grown scrub as a consequence of record rainfall last winter. The fire has run over these mountains and down the canyons, and people in those areas have been evacuated. It is heading south towards the notorious 101 freeway (though it has quite a way to go before it reaches that far) and is heading west towards the Rocketdyne research plant, known around here for poisoning the water supplies to the people who live in the evacuated canyons, and for extremely noisy rocket motor tests. There is another arm of the fire this side of the freeway that is currently running north around the hills and mountains that mark the northern wall of Simi, at whose edge I live. But that fire is moving only very slowly, because it is against the wind, so it is still way up on the pass. Still, my kids have friends who live that way.

It is, at night, a stunningly beautiful thing to see - the more so, I know from past years, the closer and more dangerous it becomes.

Early Next Day: driving for the morning coffee (no kitchen, remember?) the view ahead through the window-confines of avenue trees, see flames up in the mountain and a little smoke. "Not too bad" says me. Little further on - just a very little - the view widens, widens into a miles-wide panorama of thick, heavy, billowing smoke. Ah.

The fire has pretty-much passed us by, but is headed south and still rampant. TV News is all over it, showing the monster flames teasing communities other side of the mountains. Still headed 101-ward, getting closer to it. There are hundreds of firefighters up and around - been up in those mountains all night - doing what they can to save and protect homes and businesses, with remarkable success: only one home is said to have been lost so far. It isn't bad enough this heat, that heat, and the thick heavy clothing they have to wear, but the terrain is so difficult. Magnificent, all of them.

The End of the World...

HE END OF THE WORLD, when it comes, will be beautiful. It will be timed - delayed by a couple of hours, even - to coincide with sundown over the western seaboard, where the sun writes "Goodnight" in shadows wreathing Ronald Reagan's tomb.

Tonight I watched a rocket streak across the ocean skies: carrying a secret satellite to space, for once, where usually a dummy warhead catapults towards the Marshall Islands, condemned to not be hit by all-important Missile Defense. This is the fourth I've seen, all launched from Vandenberg AFB some ways up the coast. All of them at sundown; all of them astonishingly beautiful.

The first was on the road to Vegas - I was driving, the family snoozing - and I could only snatch an over-shoulder glimpse of now-and-then. I did not know what I was seeing, and wrongly supposed it an aircraft breaking the sound barrier. The second, summer after 9/11, I was driving home from work, west along the 101, heading into sunset. An apparition in my windshield, looked at first a jet plane heading towards me, into LAX, a bright spot-light, trailing a heavy, curiously curling contrail. The tail so bright, reflecting and refracting the last rays of the sun. Then it exploded, in a silent Puh!, an airborne sphere of water - a bubble - that just grew and grew and grew as though blown by cracked-cheeked Western Wind. A huge ball of waterdrops, wide as the view. And with it, too, the burning bright-white nipple of light. A moment of panic - what terror is this? - and then a second burst, further away and higher, then slowly-dawning realization what it was. A missile; an I.C.B.M; casting off its rocket stages. The light winks out, a parcel of lead, a dummy, is slung along its way to freefall somewhere east of Chile. All that remains to the eye is its tail, and that for a further hour.

Beautiful.

The end of the world, when it comes, will be beautiful. A hundred, a thousand, a sky filled with silent streaks and expanding spheres of steam, and torches winking out.

Italian Opera

Madame Butterfly, that most loathsome piece, rendered with great delicacy here, at No-sword, via the excellent discovery of Odious and Peculiar by way of Natalie Solent.

Something here for Cowtown Pattie, too - or should I say "Red Ethel Flint"?

Sky Is Falling In.

AYING IN BED, reading, around 1am, and the dogs start barking: old Maier out in the yard with his old-dawg bark, young Colonel Roughskins down in the kitchen with his high-pitched yelp; and dogs in yards around the neighborhood blabbering and shouting. Coyotes, thinks me, for they had been out in force earlier in the evening, under a crystal-clear sky with just one puff of cloud strategically sat before a huge autumn moon: kind of effect that puts one eerily in mind of "Independence Day" or "Close Encounters". Keep the cats inside tonight, then, no matter how loudly they complain: already lost one this summer. Chow, or Chum: whatevs. Coyotes, then, or Roughskin's Celebration Song, for he had indeed dodged a bullet that day being hugely sick and diahorretic the night before, causing us to cancel his scheduled surgery. He doesn't know it yet, but they'll be coming off tomorrow - Wednesday. Poor wee man. Wee man not much longer. How callously our women dismiss these things, whilst every full-blooded male in the house cringes and shivers as though it were he?

Not coyotes. Lying in bed, dogs racketing, wife commanding Go tell that little bugger to shut the hell up!, then a rumble, a scrape - like somebody shifting furniture out in the yard. Whawossat? Thunder. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, out of clear skies, Thunder. And rain - our first since May.

The season has begun, then, wherein Los Angeles local news goes ape over rain, and Los Angeles bloggers go ape over Los Angeles local news. Reading my mail this morning in front of the TV, not watching, not really listening, just using it as background. Catch the edge of a voice saying "winds of around 45mph, that's Tropical Storm speeds, Steve!", turn round in my seat to shout back "Shut the fech up! Tropical storm my hairy arse, ya useless bint!" only to catch myself, nick-of-time like, notice the banner says Florida and Rita, not Sepulveda Pass.

My kids, they love the rain: but my kids, all of them, they are idiots and not to be paid any attention. They are indeed living proof that the old admonition to "ignore them, they'll go away" is total bollox. They won't, dammit. A very different kind of love, this, that they call on the phone of an afternoon to yelp But it's raaaaaining! I need a lift home! They're so cute when they're young - that's the thing! It's a Trap, a big-ole' bad-ole' Trap, with a capital SUCKER. Just wait a couple of years, see how smarmy and cutsie ole' Lileks is then, eh? His little girl will be different, natch, she won't turn-out like that. You just keep telling yourself that, pal: we all do.

Me, I know better about rain. I've had my fill of rain. I've served my thirty-five in the wind- and sheet-blasted streets and doorways, smoked chill-sodden cigarettes under gloom-laden skies for my country. I don't care if it never rains here - it can rain everywhere else and flow here properwise: that's what the Colorado river is for.

The one concession I'll grant to this rain, this little pour, is that it sort of saved my bacon. I had forgotten, past two days, to run the backyard sprinkler. I still have to do this by hand because the electrics, bless them, are buggered. A pinch in the cable somewhere, a break, and I haven't had time to run new. Such a pain in the arse that, too, since it runs through plastic conduit, much of it buried, between the valve and a grille in the garage wall. Lots of corners, which impede the snaking of new wiring. I used to be a sparkey, an electrical fitter, long time ago, but there's good reason I'm not any more. Too much else to be doing meantime to waste any more time on sprinklers. That can wait. We're still without a kitchen - won't see the new one until the end of this month - and we're still moving outlets around, anticipating cabinetry. We thought the fridgerator would stay in the same place, but we discovered this weekend that it won't: it moves to the right a couple of inches, but that's a couple of inches too far for the outlet it uses. Another hole in the wall. The new French Doors we installed look real good, though. It'll all be worth it in the end. You just keep telling yourself that, pal.

We've been without a kitchen for two, mibbe three months. All it contains is a small minibar fridge and a microwave; that and a ton of boxed household crap; oh, and ladders and tools and buckets and wires and stuff. We're heartily sick of eating out - rather, of eating in of take-out. Every week we cycle the list of favored take-out restaurants: Monday italian; Tuesday something exotic from the Valley my wife will pick-up on her way home since all The Spawn feed on grandma Tuesdays; Wednesday maybe korean, maybe burgers, maybe mexican, depending; Thursdays everyone eats at grandmas, even us; Fridays is pizza. Weekends are whatever. I will not tell you how much we spend on dinner every night, but there are seven of us and prices here are booming. The fortune we are spending on a spanking-new kitchen, with its sumptuous new shiney new super-cool stainless-steel range, that we may dine on Hamburger Helper for the next twenty years. We won't ever be doing this again, I can tell you! Not until next year, at least, when Upstairs will be made-over. After that? Feck it! We'll sell! We'll sell on a thursday while the Brood are out collecting their welfare checks, change all the locks, and head-out for Kansas or Idaho or somewhere far.

More sickening still, more desperate even than eating-in take-out for months, is that we are glued day-in and day-out to HGTV: to Home & Garden television channel. We know every goddamned show inside-out, every presenter Yay or Nay; favorites and tossers. We like, in ascending order: Curb Appeal, Designer's Challenge, Landscaper's Challenge, What You Get For The Money, Kenneth of reDesign, and Designed To Sell. We like House Hunters for scorn, and Weekend Warriors for schadenfreude. We hate all those crappy penny-pinching shows like Design on a Dime or Crap in the Attic; but we despise, with all of our being, Debbie Travis and all her foul works. The stake is too good for her, says we.

How sad is that, people? How sad that we, skirted descendant of fierce and terror-charging highland warriors, whose DNA is most assuredly better than Life Insurance, how sad that we are reduced to this, this avid consumption of H. G. T. V.

For shame.

Gimme a T, for Trouble

Ever the follower, today I'm propelled by vortices into the slipstream trailing behind Whiskey Prajer and DarkoV, both of whom confess to guilty-secret T-shirts they're way too old, or too embarassed, to wear in front of their families, let alone a gawping public.

The impression I receive of both gentlemen from their writings is that they are, most likely, far better dressed than I in the everyday? Since leaving behind the mandatory uniforms of high school, and the shame of wearing mother-bought trousers that were always a half-mast too short, I have been strictly jeans and T-shirt; and since arriving in the sun-blessed Golden State, strictly shorts and T-shirt. True, I am in middle-life; but there has been no crisis to cause this - at least, not of the regular flavor - but rather a redemption. After thirty-five years of grey-skyed gloom and perpetual rain, it is almost a duty to expose pale-weathered legs to the soaking sun. It is a form of celebration: Shorts, T-shirts, farmer tan - that's me, that is.

I do dress well occasionally - quite literally in keeping with some or other occasion. I dress fittingly for weddings or for funerals - and I was indeed shocked to attend one funeral here where "Beach Casual" remained the bereaved's code; southern California's catholics do not wear Sunday Best, in my experience - and I dress smartly whenever we go out, my belovéd and I, to theater or opera or dinner or parties or dances. She, on the other hand, is always impeccably and beautifully dressed. She buys clothes and shoes; I buy computer gear and games.

I am a tink, and had thought incorrigibly so. Until around a year ago, that is, when through medical necessity I began to dress smarter: a healing surgical scar on my throat would cause a mild choking sensation when worn with a T. Since that time I've been wearing linen breeks and silken shirts to work, and people have been talking! This might be my mid-life crisis! Finally too old for shorts?

I have many, many T-shirts, then, in various states of disrepair. None of them are of bands or albums: no AC-DC, no Zeppelin or Hendrix, no Beatles - those are worn by my kids. Most have something written on them: just no bands. Two or three I would say are too embarassing to wear - one sentimental, one political, and one K.I.T.H Satan Worship shirt that people won't get.

But: there is one shirt I wear often which was a gift from my father-in-law, who bought it at a local "Highland Games" he took the kids to one year. The caption reads: "SCOTTISH DNA - BETTER THAN LIFE INSURANCE"; but I have absolutely no idea what that means?

Seriously - what the heck is that supposed to mean? It puzzles me every time I wear the shirt. Answers, anyone?

Those Who Can...

Speaking of Hitch, he has at last managed to contrive a public debate with the odious George Galloway, a fat frump who has always ran away from Hitchens in the past. I wonder what excuse he'll pull tomorrow?

Galloway, you may recall, came to prominence here in the US earlier this year when he harangued some wilting Senators at one of their investigating committees or other. Sort of left them flabbergasted and silent, left them looking a right bunch of pansies. Being a brit, and more especially a scot, I've been acquainted with Gorgeous George for more years than I care to remember; since before he won a seat to Parliament, even. He used to appear on political TV shows while he headed a charity, "War on Want", if memory serves? His primary contribution as Chief had been to divert a large proportion of the charity's income into its "administration", using the justification that this in turn led to some significant increase in contributions. His was the first charity I knew of that did this: I had previously labored under the naive presumption that all the money one gave went to those who needed it.

A sleazy rogue, sure, but a character too, and therefore excused and indulged by the many: reminiscent of my youngest son who gets away with everything because, well, he's funny. But my kid, though full of Milo Minderbender schemes, would never cheat the poor and downtrodden. Would never suck-up to fascist arab dictators or terrorists till bloated like a tick.

It'll be an interesting match, one way or another. A glimpse of british debating form, I hope, which is much sharper and crueller than the hours-long self-congratulatory circle-jerking of Congress. American knives are wielded very differently, and in an altogether different place.

It'll be interesting, too, to see what Wolcott makes of it? A Galloway fan whose writing style I much enjoy, but whose beliefs and arguments are often nauseating. Still, he makes me laugh - he is forgiven.

Dude of Gravity

Dang, but I need to change my name: mine is indeed a bloatee, one that hides a multitude of chins.

Anyway: I began to write a post the other day but I quickly ran out of steam, so it quietly simpered away while I did something more useful, or at least renumerative. It began:

<PONTIFICATE type="tiresome">
Far be it for me to disagree with Hitchens - a writer I very much enjoy, and who I often find compellingly persuasive - not that that is saying very much since I am incapable of mounting or sustaining any kind of argument, and am congenitally configured to lose every one? In fact, was a time I fancied writing an occasional Blog Feature of my own, something like "Fatso's Friday Morning Fuxit" or somesuch where you my dear readers would send me your arguments of the day and I would promise to lose them in Three, or mibbe sometimes even Lose That Argument In One!

But you know what I'm trying to say, don't you? If I collected intellectual hero baseball cards, Hitch would be one sealed in plastic. So I am not about to disagree with his piece in Slate this week, which, nutshell, denigrates the proposition that, had we left Saddam alone, New Orleans would have been saved! Read it for yourself - I happen to agree with it, although there are more things under heaven to rant about these days than the perpetual sophistry of Moonbat blogs. Not like they're actually in charge of anything, is it? Not like they are remotely a Power that fearless Truth needs to be spoken to, hmm?

No. What I've found myself thinking at odd moments is a sort of reverse-orthogonal view: if this is how they've managed Katrina, what the hell have they done in Iraq? New Orleans: the rose-tinted view of Baghdad. It's that whole "path strewn with petals" thing - the immeasurable incompetence that has so far ruined one of the few Good Things that bozon ever did.

Blah...blah...blah...
</PONTIFICATE>

There's only so much ranting one can do, I find, before the brain is overwhelmed by the enormity of misdeed and the tinyness of self. It simply shuts down, asking itself What's the point? Time for this little pit of the - ugh - blogosphere - to return to the humdrum trivia of its everyday life. I've done a lot of ranting these past couple of weeks; fortunately for all most of it mental and off-line, with occasional tremulous vocal outbursts. full of sound and fury, signifying... well, all that.

I do so hate the word "blog" - or 'Blog as Damian the Pootergeek insists on writing. It is such an ugly word which, unable to keep its dongle in its pants, has spawned a thousand ugly children. I think "blawg" - signifying a law blog - that is the child I detest most, and that somebody - probably a Lawprof - deserves to be taken outside and shagged with the big-end of a ragman's trumpet for coining it. Not that I coined that phrase either - it came from an old friend, one I haven't heard from in many years. He was one of that brand of character of whom people at work would keep a ledger of sayings or malapropisms uttered at some point? He - call him JB - was a sayings guy - little peaches like "Shitty death!" or "Slotted labour" (women workers); whereas another - call him JD was a malaprop who would talk about "the Forth road rail bridge", which I suppose you have to be a local to find very funny? Characters sadly lacking here in America, at least in my limited experience. They probably do exist, in every company, just no longer within my workplace bubble: there is in fact a very funny commerical running for FedEx featuring just one such guy - "We don't get french benefits?" - so I know they exist somewhere? But how bland, how poor, is life at work without one.

Another good reason for discarding The Rant is that I very quickly regret them: it is the realization that I, who thinks himself a happy-go-lucky, irreligious non-judgemental man o'the world, can so easily read like the worst of pious purse-lipped moralizers, puffed in extremis like a bloateed Church Lady? Tut tut tut. Nobody needs that.

No: the reason I quoted myself [writing to myself, of course], the reason I thrust this drivel upon you at all was not at all to show you how great a piece it would have been, how superior an argument you thereby missed-out on, but rather it was that while writing said fluffery I reminded myself of my "Fatso's Friday Morning Fuxit" idea. It's been squeaking in the background for a looooong time, but I don't think I've ever made it public before? But I like this idea; it plays to my strengths.

I realize it demands a commitment from me that I might not always be able to make, namely to write something every Friday, but I fancy giving it a go? An experiment, even?

To make it happen requires some customer intervention: I need my readers to posit propositions that I can, somehow, lose for you? You could even take them down the pub afterwards and regail your pals in true Pub-bore fashion.

I'm wait-ing, tap, tap, tap...



[Local People Note: there's a Forth Bridge and there's a Forth Road Bridge, a mile-and-a-half apart. There is no Fourth Bridge, sadly, a mistake many foreigners make, most notably the commander of a US aircraft carrier who collided with one after being instructed to anchor just shy of the Forth Bridge. He'd only counted two]

Fading Abilities

Is this satire? The older I get, it seems, the harder it is to tell:

"It took almost no time for President Bush to put his stamp on the national response to the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, a reminder that modern communications have reshaped the constitutional division of powers in our government in ways that the Founding Fathers never could have imagined.

Because the commander in chief is also the communicator in chief, when a crisis emerges the nation's eyes turn to him as to no other official. We cannot yet calculate the political fallout from Hurricane Katrina and its devastating human and economic consequences, but one thing seems certain: It makes the previous signs of political weakness for Bush, measured in record-low job approval ratings, instantly irrelevant and opens new opportunities for him to regain his standing with the public."

I've long had a problem distinguishing real opinions from fantasmagoria in right-wing writings, ever since I read, many years ago, an autobiography of Watergate spook G. Gordon Liddy. In his closing chapters he spoke of choosing a wife for her genes, that suitable attributes might be propagated. I remember thinking "He's so at it! He's winding us up, playing Fascist to the gallery?" They have earned a certain notoriety and I often think they're being particularly provocative or extremist just for laughs?

I have the same trouble with Talk Radio in its various guises. "They don't really mean that, do they?"

Nowadays, the older I get, the more I wonder, the more I believe they do. Not a joke, no sirree. They are every bit as malevolent and mysoginist as they appear, and their boys and their kind are in charge of this country.

Yes, it took almost no time - was it five, six days? - "for President Bush to put his stamp on the national response to the tragedy", with a staged photo-op, no less. Fake Levée repairs.

Mission Accomplished.

I've written before, somewhere, possibly not here, that those who scream loudest about the evils of Big Government invariably suck hardest at its tit. No surprise, then, that before the first school bus had been "requisitioned" or Red Cross food truck prevented from entering New Orleans in case, you know, people get the wrong idea and think the schools are all open What's the problem?, that before any of that, contracts had been awarded. I guess we'll never know for sure if this was another "no bid" deal, because anyone foolish enough to say so out loud is likely to be fired or demoted?

I promise never again to mock those who cry "Halliburton!" at every turn.

Here's the thing, from a little man sat in California: I'm not alone in my anger. People everywhere here, in stores, at work, met in the street, talking over the phone, people everywhere here are disgusted and ashamed and outraged at what has happened in New Orleans and at, to be polite, what we shall call the incompetence and negligence of Mr Bush's Federal Government. Haven't seen such uniformity or willingness of everyday folks to talk about events since 9th September 2001.

I was most surprised - and delighted - on Friday morning when my local Fox affiliate cut into the daily Morning Show to bring us the President, LIVE!, being congratulated and fawned-over by suck-up sycophants in an Alabama hangar. Standing in front of some Rescue helicopters clearly being held in reserve. Cut back to the studio and one of the presenters - Steve Edwards it was - voiced his utter disgust at what we'd just seen and heard, and said out-loud what we all were thinking. Called it as he saw it. Good for Him.

Maybe some good will come of this. None yet, though.

Oh, Thought of this after DarkoV reminded me of "Brownie"'s last job.

I love a good conspiracy as much as the next man - love the idea of conspiracy theories. But, you know, being what I am I always believe in "Cock-Up" rather than actual "Conspiracy". But honestly - nobody, not even my gormless 18 yr-old, nobody can truly be so fucking stupid as "Brownie" and "Georgie" and their fucked-up FEMA.

Nobody.

Excuse my french: but despite the rantings of so many Busholyte apologists, the French have done more for New Orleans than he has.

Too Horrible for Words

I last wrote Saturday night after a day on the beach, totally oblivious to Katrina and the looming catastrophe in New Orleans. Wasn't until Sunday night that I saw - or read, I suppose - the news. Typical Californian, huh?

My favorite US city. Took us six years, but we finally honeymooned there last June: I had visited before, and long promised my wife that one day I'd take her. Place had soul, you know? Like no other city I'd ever known. Music, every kind of music, pouring out of every window and door. But step out the 'Quarter, cross Rampart, another world entirely; world of slums and Projects and mean-staring cops. "The f**k 'you doin' ovah heah?"

I can't speak of what has happened, of what is happening, still. Or rather, what is not. Read a report on The Interdictor nearly broke my heart:

"The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians."

They're throwing crates of food at them, off a bridge.

I have felt such anger today, too, as I've poured over this report or that. How much do we pay in taxes, collectively? For this? We've been sold down a river, America; taken to the cleaners. Shameful.