Carnes: Debris rains, confusion reigns
Social media was ablaze last week with testosterone-filled yahoos from Montana to Texas shouting to “send that danged ol’ commie balloon down this-a-way and I’ll show you how a real man deals with it!”
Yes, they would be so much happier had John Dutton blown it out of the sky above Bozeman, even if the shotgun of debris had rained down on a pre-school with 28 innocent children and three teachers having lunch inside, killing all in the name of (insert deity of choice).
Mysterious ways, indeed.
The NRA-based propaganda machine has zero limitations when it comes to usurping the bourbon-filled burps of overcompensating males deftly in touch with their “please-think-I’m-macho” side.
Good grief, heaven (if there were such a place) help us.
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The Chinese-ish space lasers were going to kill us all, or at the very least set off an EMP to disable American cell phones and game consoles nationwide (George Santos had it wrong, or maybe it was Margorie Taylor Greene, I confuse idiots), sending us into the 21st-century version of the stone age, but only for liberals.
Preppers and other survivalist types will be just fine, as long as reality never figures into their equation.
“Oh, the humanity!” I and (I’m guessing here) a few thousand others immediately said upon viewing the quick deflation of the “Red Zeppelin” in the form of a Wuhan-built Death Star out over the Atlantic (no bats required).
It was funny, for a brief moment, to make mental Hindenburg analogies to help deal with the situation, but much more entertaining to watch the armchair military experts condemning the timing, techniques and technologies used as opposed to explaining how they would have done it using TikTok.
These are the same who shared their honorary medical degrees during COVID-19.
Anyway, pop two more of these bad boys, and I bet we get a free stuffed giant panda (made in China).
Speaking of freefalling, since the debt ceiling has been raised 78 times, short of having George Santos set up a GoFundMe page, I think it’s safe to say there is no actual debt ceiling.
Ron DeSantis down in Florida wants to whitewash Black history and record menstrual cycles of teen girls, although silly me assumes the latter would have been placed under the purview of Matt Gaetz.
Tech companies are laying off workers faster than snake oil is selling on Truth Social (it’s a real website where just about anything except actual truths can be found) and scientists want to “de-extinct” the Woolly Mammoth and the Dodo Bird.
Conservatives are obsessed with using the government to ban books with which they disagree, ban reproductive rights for women with which they disagree, and ban liberals for daring to use the government to ban anything with which they disagree.
Groceries, rent, electricity and gas (both petrol and natural) keep rising faster than Chinese balloons and American credit card debt creeps closer to $1 trillion (that’s a 1 with 12 zeros), yet we just had the best jobs report in a few years with the lowest unemployment numbers since The Beatles broke up.
So while the confusing and hypocritical world as we know it (outside of Happy Valley, of course) continues to implode, relish in the obvious fact that around here our main concerns are still: Will we get as much snow in February as we did in January? And how many medals will Mikaela win at the World Championships?
Yep, we have our priorities straight.
And for the record, today’s word salad was not created by asking ChatGPT to “come up with something” concerning headlines over the past week, as the entire thing was quickly tossed together by moi sitting (OK, lying down) on a beach in Florida.
Richard Carnes, of Avon, writes weekly. He can be reached at poor@vail.net.
