Tragic

I'm troubled by the news from Boston. The heroics of innocent bystanders and the victimization of children moved me emotionally so maybe I'm not completely disillusioned with humanity. My condolences are sort of redundant and self serving but I offer them anyway. Several mass killings this past year hardly got my attention. Even Hurricane Sandy, which displaced tens of thousands became a piece of selfish ammunition in my climate change propaganda arsenal. I don't know if I identified with anyone or empathized with any victims. Remember the Newton school shooting? That happened right around the time my career got cut short in the oil field and I was nearly crippled by pain of accumulated trauma. I didn't want to dwell on a tragedy that had no closure...no easily explained motive or plan, no satisfying cause and effect, preferring to mourn my own self image.*

My initial reaction is to either look too closely at a mysteriously awful event or not look close enough. It's almost like poisonous Media addiction has created pundits of everyone...but it's all a defense mechanism for associated social problems we are afraid to confront. Stop reading here if you want to grieve.



I recently finished a book by the media whore Bill O'Reilly about the Assassination of Lincoln. I'm so terribly cynical that I interpreted the entire book as a road map as to how to assassinate a president that O'Reilly was publishing in the hopes someone would repeat history. Isn't that awful, that I distrust a media source so much that I would suspect him of not merely speaking treasonously to millions via the seditious Fox News (which he does), but to going the next step and deviously writing a book that basically maps out how to do it? I fluctuate between thinking, "No, Oggy, that's crazy, the Lincoln assassination is famous and pure history-whore bread and butter. It's slow pitch softball for a pseudo historian like O'Reilly...." to..."He intentionally titles the book "Killing Lincoln" because he wants to make Booth less of an evil person. Assassin has a negative cowardly connotation and O'Reilly makes every effort to present Booth as a Southern Loyalist who was engaged in a brave war act...and he won that particular battle with Lincoln. He's obtusely, in code, goading conservative loyalists to do the same thing today, saying 'Booth was an idiot and he succeeded, so can you'...and he's demonic enough to use the author of the emancipation proclamation to target one of its benefactors."

You see how insane I am? But I didn't write a book about the assassination of a president and I don't go on Fox News every day calling Obama and Democrats monstrous incarnations of evil...so the only thing I know is that I'm adding to the crazed conspiracy theories that will surely follow.

Anyway, Abe Lincoln was assassinated on April, 14th 1865, a date when the Civil War was technically still in effect.

But that's crazy because the Boston Marathon had nothing to do with the President or the Civil War. And I have serious problems of my own to deal with today.
So, look within your hearts for therein lies the problem.

*I know it may appear that I'm a California Hippy adrift in the nation but once I wore a dirty tanktop shirt, got a buzz cut from my divorced mother, went to The Boys Club for boxing lessons, played kick-the-can in the streets of Somerville, an asbestos siding suburb of Boston ovah nea Camb'idge. I've eaten Curry in the Central Square Indian restaurants...spent more time at Fenway than Matsuzaka ever did, and watched fireworks over the Charles. I dropped all my "r" and talked like, "Hey Nickky, you evah gonna gimme back my bike I loan'd ya? Huh? What I gotta do? Club ya with a stick?" Heck I even saw the Pope John Paul in Boston back when I was a devout Catholic in 1981...right around the time someone shot him. California progressive ideals were something that came later. Life goes on in mysterious cycles of strangeness.