Tuesday Voice: Bah! Humbug!

By Paul Clark 
(aka motomynd)

Thanks to the holiday season, that joyful time of year we run out of excuses and finally have to spend time with people we manage to avoid the rest of the year, our vegan / animal rights / backwoods living family received a mega-dose of modern Americana in December. We will eventually recover (thank you for your concern) but we wanted to spread the pain to expedite the process. Think of it as telling someone a horrible joke you just heard, so you can more quickly forget it.
    Some observations:

• Every American home but ours, which has no TV at all, now apparently has to have at least a 48-inch big screen TV to meet some sort of safe-housing code that must have been passed in the past year. Americans hopefully appreciate the earnest Chinese workers who are willing to toil for $3.00/day to create such behemoths, all so Americans can watch programming that becomes exponentially more inane with each passing year. 
• These giant screens are filled mainly with stories about some guy with a long beard who looks the part yet amazingly is not a member of the rock group ZZ Topp. Instead he is the patriarch of some "redneck humor" show called "Duck Dynasty" and he has a problem with gay people. Why rednecks having issues with gay people is a hot news topic is particularly intriguing to us, because as long as we can remember rednecks have had issues with gay people. Yet that shocking bit of information is apparently THE news item dominating holiday programming. 
• Cracker Barrel is still in business. Now THAT is news. We were once unwittingly lured into a Cracker Barrel restaurant. We found the experience not unlike the time we took a hidden camera undercover in a slaughter house to expose the abuses perpetrated there. That chunk of pig or cow someone eats at Cracker Barrel was very possibly carved out of an animal while it was still alive, but that doesn't seem to concern anyone who eats there. In fact, based on the TV coverage, Cracker Barrel "diners" will apparently eat just about anything that isn't actually moving. If Cracker Barrel is still in business, that means the items on their menu actually did not kill all the people who went there decades ago? Or that their children are still going because they are unable to make the connection between the untimely deaths of their parents and their dietary choices? Or modern American heart surgery and artery unclogging "rotor rooter" techniques are indeed something to behold? Whatever, somehow Cracker Barrel is still in business, and the news that is even more amazing than that, is its devotees who belly up to that trough on a regular basis are apparently actually taken seriously by television networks. Amazing. 
• People still smoke cigarettes. Seriously. When one lives in the boonies on a two-lane backroad and listens mainly to educational radio programming, and watches "TV" only as a Hulu broadcast a couple of times a month, and spends time mainly with neighbors who devote much of their spare time to running and cycling for their health, one forgets that many, many Americans are, frankly, really, really stupid. Nearly 50 years ago my health class was subjected to heinous films showing the effects of people smoking, and the gory intricacies of lung surgery, and people coughing up organs and such. And yet, half a century later, people still smoke. Amazing. 

To say the least, our holiday season was, well, interesting. We hope yours was too.
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Copyright © 2014 by Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

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