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mostly there for propaganda
Tuesday, June 25 2002not far from Camp David, Appalachian Maryland, USAI took Sally for a walk in the forest behind the cabin this morning, hoping to make it all the way to a rocky cliff I'd seen yesterday when Gretchen and I were wandering around lost. But after awhile I noticed Sally wasn't following me. It turned out that she'd gone back to the cabin and gone upstairs to attempt to get Gretchen out of bed. So there I was walking around nude in the forest all by myself, abandoned even by my dog. [REDACTED]
It seems we spent much of the day watching videotapes of old episodes of Sex and the City one after the other. Such rapid-fire succession is the probably the best way to watch that show, although it does draw attention to characteristics that make it annoying, at least to someone of my temperament. Sometimes I just want to reach into the television and strangle, nay, disembowel those silly ladies for their idiotic superficiality. And then there's the issue of how blandly mainstream they are, or try to be. What a bunch of little schtevettes, making the cast of Seinfeld seem like bohemians by comparison! Carrie freaks out when the guy she's dating wants her to piss on him, in the shower. Give me a fucking break. Then again, what do I know of the way the world works? I'm hermetically sealed off from the mainstream and don't personally know anyone (except maybe David the Rabbi) who professes a belief in God, yet 95% of Americans reportedly hold such a superstition.
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Why did they put the additional "Yes, believe it or not, we're patriotic too" flag over the N?As we crossed New Jersey, we saw a strange orange sphere hovering over the eastern horizon. At first I didn't know what it was. Might it be a weather balloon? A spacecraft piloted by the Jersey Devil? But then I realized it was actually the moon, somehow made orange by the peculiar non-award-winning Garden State atmosphere. By the time we'd reached Brooklyn, it had risen higher and taken on a more benevolent shade of yellow.
We took a risk and decided to try to get to Brooklyn through the Holland Tunnel and across Manhattan instead of across Staten Island and the Verrazano Bridge. But still we encountered what would probably be classified as "a significant delay," because half of the tunnel had been shut down for repairs.
There are all sorts of showy "security" displays at the entrance to the tunnel and on either side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Police cars idle with flashing lights, cops wade out in traffic and wear suspicious frowns, that sort of thing. But from the look of things, these rituals are mostly for propaganda value: to show the nervous lemmings "something is being done to stop the evil doers."
Actually, when you stop to consider the near-daily suicide bombings in Isræl (and the bi-annual Basque-sponsored car bombings even in tranquil Spain), you have to agree that Americans have it pretty good with respect to terrorism. What a difference a couple of oceans and the lack of an indigenous pissed-off minority make.
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