Moral values and the Awl Bidness

Saturday 08/13/2005 8:24 a.m.

Dear Ed,

Marion started the choral part of the Ninth by Beethoven—where the baritone sings, “O freude!” and Rosie began frowning and shaking her head. I turned off the radio—I’m not hip on hearing the Ninth at this hour either. The silence was then tomb-like.

Nor am I hip on hearing two shouting heads wrangling about punishing or offering a suspended sentence and therapy to a woman who is accused of having sex with her sixteen-year-old pupil. I would like to send an e-mail to MSNBC denouncing their new Rita Cosby program which uses the format of facing off two shouting heads and letting them go at it between commercial breaks, which come all too often. But I’ve got it on to break the silence.

Got to fix my oatmeal and get going. It’s almost nine and the heat index is getting close to 90 already.

Rosie has gone to ready for the day and I turned off MSNBC News. Pat Buchanan was going to come on and say that the mother near Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch protesting the death of her son in Iraq is “reaching a point of diminishing returns” in trying to call attention to her plight and that of other sons in harm’s way and their grieving mothers. Thus, Pat reasons, the woman’s concerns are trivial. As Rummy says, yuh fight the war with the army yuh got, not the one yuh want—what’s left of it. Rather than fuming in sufferance of Bukey’s mouth-flatus that is sure to come in billowing clouds of mouth-stink, I switched to Turner, to a black and white movie with Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Charles Coburn, and Marilyn Monroe. It’s a farce that is meant to be one, whereas MSNBC is an unintended black comedy of horrors.

And then there’s the Fox News Network. Like death by torture, I don’t want to think about it.

Well, I’ve finished my oatmeal and need to get on my way. I think I’ll take the same route I took yesterday only backwards. Amen and may I go with God.
...

Fifty-nine minutes of trek, the first twenty of it really booking. Beautiful sights and sounds—chirring locusts and cooing doves. And sunny and steaming hot. This is day 225 of the year, with 140 to go—should anybody care. At the Swifty gas and convenience store at State and Cragmont last night, regular unleaded gasoline was $2.559 a gallon. God dog. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, just love the hell out of ‘em. The boys in the awl bidness are running the country. You voted for "moral values," people. Moral values this.

JT