| GREG-STRANGE.COM |
"If you haven't found something strange during the
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
PROVIDING SUBSTANTIVE COMMENTARY ON THE
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
A Juxtaposition of Jabberwocky
Contrary to numerous sensational events that have made it
to the cycles of cable news networks in recent months, the state
of Georgia, and in particular the city of Atlanta, is not
populated totally by lunatics, malcontents and murderers. I
know, I live in Atlanta, and we’re not all courthouse killers,
runaway brides and suicidal crane climbers. Maybe it’s just
been a run of bad luck lately that’s gotten us in the national
spotlight time after time, all for less than complimentary
reasons.
Of course, if you go back further in time, there’s plenty
more. Like the bombing of the 1996 Olympics (which was
already getting a bad rap in the media for inefficiency and
crass commercialism). And there was the bombing of the gay
bar, which, like the Olympic bombing, turned out to be the
work of a good ol’ boy from a neighboring state. And don’t
forget the distraught day trader during the fevered market of
1999 who went on a shooting binge down in the financial
district killing nine and injuring thirteen.
Georgia has also had its share of well-known, even
sometimes infamous, politicians and celebrities. Recently,
juxtaposed against one another on page A3 of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, were articles about local
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (my representative) and
business mogul/CNN founder Ted Turner. The respective
articles were headlined with “McKinney reopens 9/11” and
“Turner to stump for DMZ ecology.”
Wow, I thought, this ought to be good. How much
homegrown nuttiness can the AJC get on one page of its paper?
Turns out, quite a bit.
I’ve often asked the question: Why me? What I mean is, out
of 435 Congressional districts in the United States of America,
why do I have to reside in Cynthia McKinney‘s? Or more
pointedly, why did they have to gerrymander the district that I
live in such that I went from formerly being represented by
Newt Gingrich, conservative firebrand overflowing with unique
ideas for ending the liberal welfare state, to being represented
by Cynthia McKinney, left-wing sympathizer of every radical
cause I eschew and general all-around wack job?
This woman has long been known for things like advocating
for disastrous Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, cozying up
with and receiving campaign donations from all kinds of
terrorist sympathizers, for favoring Palestinians over Israelis
and for having a blatantly anti-Semitic father in the Georgia
State Legislature whose prejudices may have rubbed off on her.
McKinney, herself an African-American, even once said that
“Al Gore’s Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I’ve
never seen him around more than one at a time.” Huh? I have
no idea what the context was, but is it even possible there could
have been one such that the statement would seem sensible?
The straw that broke the camel’s back, to use a Middle
Eastern metaphor, came in an interview she gave in early ’02
when she revealed her theories about the Bush plot to profit off
9/11. The idea was that Bush knew ahead of time it was going
to happen but didn’t prevent it so that he and his defense
industry pals could make a killing in the warmongering
business, not to mention what he and his oil pals would later
make off the oil they’d steal from Iraq. It would require of Bush
the most monstrous evil imaginable, but that didn’t faze
McKinney.
It was all a bit too much, even for Democrats (although only
a couple of years later during the presidential race, Howard
Dean conveniently found such theories “interesting“). In 2002
she was voted out of office in the heavily black, Democratic
district. A lot of Republicans, including myself, voted in that
Democratic primary for the express purpose of voting for one of
McKinney’s Democratic opponents, Denise Majette, and it
worked.
Well, guess what? In ‘04 Majette decided to run for the U.S.
Senate and McKinney was able to sneak back in under the radar
screen and get her old seat back by a comfortable margin.
Apparently there’s always a constituency for her brand of
harebrained anti-Americanism. And now she’s back to her old
tricks, as the AJC article reported, having chaired “a Capitol
Hill hearing . . . on whether the Bush administration was
involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” Again, why
me? What did I do to deserve this kind of despicable
representation and abject embarrassment?
“What we are doing,” McKinney intoned during the
proceedings, “is asking the unanswered questions of the 9/11
families.” Really? How many of those families are clamoring to
ask the types of “unanswered questions” that lurk in the
backwater of McKinney’s fevered paranoiac delusions? But
that’s my congresswoman, doing the important work of the
nation.
And then there’s Ted Turner, or, as he is alternatively
known, “Captain Outrageous,” or “the mouth of the South.” His
mouth has certainly been an unending reservoir of dumb,
boorish and offensive claptrap, from calling Christianity a
“religion for losers,” to saying that the 9/11 terrorists were
brave, to comparing George W. Bush to Julius Caesar, to
professing a fondness for Fidel Castro, and on and on. He also
married Jane Fonda and gave a billion dollars of his own
money to the UN.
So, as the AJC reported in a very informative page of
newsprint, “Ted Turner plans to visit North Korea next month
to promote plans to protect plant and animal life in the
demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a swath of
heavily fortified no-man’s land that also contains rare and
endangered species.”
And he thinks Christianity is for losers? How about enviro-
utopian geopolitical idiocy? Nonetheless, a Turner spokesman
said that Turner planned to visit North Korea “to promote the
idea of north-south cooperation in restoring environmental
integrity on the peninsula,” with a particular emphasis on
preserving the unique ecosystem in the demilitarized zone.
Whatever.
Ted, here’s the problem. North Korea is a paranoid,
secretive, Stalinist dictatorship whose main contributions to
its people have been famine and gulags. They’re not a bunch of
happy-headed greens just waiting for the right opportunity to
burst forth and join the civilized world in a joint environmental
project to save species of birds and fish. Their fondest wish is
not to save the delicate eco-balance of the DMZ, but to overrun
it with an invasion of the South, which they would snatch back
from the hegemony of the imperialist aggressors who made it
such a resounding capitalist success.
Why would a warm and fuzzy enviro-mission from Captain
Planet & Company change their minds? If they thought about
anything other than power -- like the prosperity, or even the
mortality, of their people -- they would toss out their washed-
up and totally discredited ideology and get on board with the
rest of the world. Even ruthless dictator/Kewpie-doll-look-
alike Kim Jong Il couldn’t help but notice the rather stark
difference between his own country’s destitution and the wild
success of his South Korean brethren.
Not that Turner’s DMZ field trip will do any harm. It’s just
such breathtaking naiveté to think it will accomplish anything
of value. But he’s always believed in his own mind that he was
somehow one of the keys to achieving world peace.
The subject of North Korea, by the way, happens to bring up
unpleasant thoughts about one more Georgian I’d just as soon
forget about. The Georgian who never met a mass-murdering
dictator he didn’t think he could sweet-talk into becoming a
model world citizen. The Georgian who went to North Korea in
1994 and struck a deal without the approval or authority of the
U.S. government, which many argue made it easier than it
otherwise would have been for that outlaw regime to get the
nukes everyone assumes it now has. I’m talking about perhaps
the most dangerous Georgian to have ever lived due to his
mollycoddling of dictators worldwide: Jimmy Carter.
Anybody just want to talk about the runaway bride instead?
Contrary to numerous sensational events that have made it
to the cycles of cable news networks in recent months, the state
of Georgia, and in particular the city of Atlanta, is not
populated totally by lunatics, malcontents and murderers. I
know, I live in Atlanta, and we’re not all courthouse killers,
runaway brides and suicidal crane climbers. Maybe it’s just
been a run of bad luck lately that’s gotten us in the national
spotlight time after time, all for less than complimentary
reasons.
Of course, if you go back further in time, there’s plenty
more. Like the bombing of the 1996 Olympics (which was
already getting a bad rap in the media for inefficiency and
crass commercialism). And there was the bombing of the gay
bar, which, like the Olympic bombing, turned out to be the
work of a good ol’ boy from a neighboring state. And don’t
forget the distraught day trader during the fevered market of
1999 who went on a shooting binge down in the financial
district killing nine and injuring thirteen.
Georgia has also had its share of well-known, even
sometimes infamous, politicians and celebrities. Recently,
juxtaposed against one another on page A3 of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, were articles about local
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (my representative) and
business mogul/CNN founder Ted Turner. The respective
articles were headlined with “McKinney reopens 9/11” and
“Turner to stump for DMZ ecology.”
Wow, I thought, this ought to be good. How much
homegrown nuttiness can the AJC get on one page of its paper?
Turns out, quite a bit.
I’ve often asked the question: Why me? What I mean is, out
of 435 Congressional districts in the United States of America,
why do I have to reside in Cynthia McKinney‘s? Or more
pointedly, why did they have to gerrymander the district that I
live in such that I went from formerly being represented by
Newt Gingrich, conservative firebrand overflowing with unique
ideas for ending the liberal welfare state, to being represented
by Cynthia McKinney, left-wing sympathizer of every radical
cause I eschew and general all-around wack job?
This woman has long been known for things like advocating
for disastrous Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, cozying up
with and receiving campaign donations from all kinds of
terrorist sympathizers, for favoring Palestinians over Israelis
and for having a blatantly anti-Semitic father in the Georgia
State Legislature whose prejudices may have rubbed off on her.
McKinney, herself an African-American, even once said that
“Al Gore’s Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I’ve
never seen him around more than one at a time.” Huh? I have
no idea what the context was, but is it even possible there could
have been one such that the statement would seem sensible?
The straw that broke the camel’s back, to use a Middle
Eastern metaphor, came in an interview she gave in early ’02
when she revealed her theories about the Bush plot to profit off
9/11. The idea was that Bush knew ahead of time it was going
to happen but didn’t prevent it so that he and his defense
industry pals could make a killing in the warmongering
business, not to mention what he and his oil pals would later
make off the oil they’d steal from Iraq. It would require of Bush
the most monstrous evil imaginable, but that didn’t faze
McKinney.
It was all a bit too much, even for Democrats (although only
a couple of years later during the presidential race, Howard
Dean conveniently found such theories “interesting“). In 2002
she was voted out of office in the heavily black, Democratic
district. A lot of Republicans, including myself, voted in that
Democratic primary for the express purpose of voting for one of
McKinney’s Democratic opponents, Denise Majette, and it
worked.
Well, guess what? In ‘04 Majette decided to run for the U.S.
Senate and McKinney was able to sneak back in under the radar
screen and get her old seat back by a comfortable margin.
Apparently there’s always a constituency for her brand of
harebrained anti-Americanism. And now she’s back to her old
tricks, as the AJC article reported, having chaired “a Capitol
Hill hearing . . . on whether the Bush administration was
involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” Again, why
me? What did I do to deserve this kind of despicable
representation and abject embarrassment?
“What we are doing,” McKinney intoned during the
proceedings, “is asking the unanswered questions of the 9/11
families.” Really? How many of those families are clamoring to
ask the types of “unanswered questions” that lurk in the
backwater of McKinney’s fevered paranoiac delusions? But
that’s my congresswoman, doing the important work of the
nation.
And then there’s Ted Turner, or, as he is alternatively
known, “Captain Outrageous,” or “the mouth of the South.” His
mouth has certainly been an unending reservoir of dumb,
boorish and offensive claptrap, from calling Christianity a
“religion for losers,” to saying that the 9/11 terrorists were
brave, to comparing George W. Bush to Julius Caesar, to
professing a fondness for Fidel Castro, and on and on. He also
married Jane Fonda and gave a billion dollars of his own
money to the UN.
So, as the AJC reported in a very informative page of
newsprint, “Ted Turner plans to visit North Korea next month
to promote plans to protect plant and animal life in the
demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a swath of
heavily fortified no-man’s land that also contains rare and
endangered species.”
And he thinks Christianity is for losers? How about enviro-
utopian geopolitical idiocy? Nonetheless, a Turner spokesman
said that Turner planned to visit North Korea “to promote the
idea of north-south cooperation in restoring environmental
integrity on the peninsula,” with a particular emphasis on
preserving the unique ecosystem in the demilitarized zone.
Whatever.
Ted, here’s the problem. North Korea is a paranoid,
secretive, Stalinist dictatorship whose main contributions to
its people have been famine and gulags. They’re not a bunch of
happy-headed greens just waiting for the right opportunity to
burst forth and join the civilized world in a joint environmental
project to save species of birds and fish. Their fondest wish is
not to save the delicate eco-balance of the DMZ, but to overrun
it with an invasion of the South, which they would snatch back
from the hegemony of the imperialist aggressors who made it
such a resounding capitalist success.
Why would a warm and fuzzy enviro-mission from Captain
Planet & Company change their minds? If they thought about
anything other than power -- like the prosperity, or even the
mortality, of their people -- they would toss out their washed-
up and totally discredited ideology and get on board with the
rest of the world. Even ruthless dictator/Kewpie-doll-look-
alike Kim Jong Il couldn’t help but notice the rather stark
difference between his own country’s destitution and the wild
success of his South Korean brethren.
Not that Turner’s DMZ field trip will do any harm. It’s just
such breathtaking naiveté to think it will accomplish anything
of value. But he’s always believed in his own mind that he was
somehow one of the keys to achieving world peace.
The subject of North Korea, by the way, happens to bring up
unpleasant thoughts about one more Georgian I’d just as soon
forget about. The Georgian who never met a mass-murdering
dictator he didn’t think he could sweet-talk into becoming a
model world citizen. The Georgian who went to North Korea in
1994 and struck a deal without the approval or authority of the
U.S. government, which many argue made it easier than it
otherwise would have been for that outlaw regime to get the
nukes everyone assumes it now has. I’m talking about perhaps
the most dangerous Georgian to have ever lived due to his
mollycoddling of dictators worldwide: Jimmy Carter.
Anybody just want to talk about the runaway bride instead?