Our national fetish

In the last week of September, three teenage boys died. No, they weren't unarmed black boys shot by twitchy, freaked-out cops, which is refreshing. No, they weren't victims of Ebola, which still, as I write this on October 20, has killed exactly zero Americans who haven't traveled to West Africa. You'd think our media would at least wait for a double digit death count before going into full set-hair-on-fire frenzy, but no, it made a special exception for this wacky bug. Must have been a slow news week in the Apocalypse Department at the Associated Press.

No, these three lads were all killed playing high school football. Not that we want to say that too loudly. Wouldn't want any parents refusing to sign those high school permission forms for their boys. I used to call football our national religion. Now, I think it's moved onward and upward. Now, it's our national fetish. That sounds about right, doesn't it? And you know we love our fetishes way more than we love our religions.

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Quite a few years ago, I saw George Carlin at the Silver Legacy. It was a memorable show, and curiously, it was the jokes and laughs that were the least memorable things about it. Oh, there were plenty of those, for sure, but what sticks with me, all these years later, is the way Carlin finished up that night. Because George spent the last 10 or 15 minutes of the performance basically chewing us out for the situation with our federal government. It was quite the righteous diatribe, cool enough to where I wasn't offended at all as he made his point, which was simply that “if we think Washington sucks, it's our fault, since we're the dopes who sent all these turkeys to run the government. So quit pissing and moaning about all these slimebags and do something about it.” I found it not just memorable, but inspirational and powerful.

I thought of George and his message of that night as I watched the recent Ebola hearings in Congress. Good lord, there were a bunch of reprehensible jerkoffs up there on the committee, grilling the various doctors on the current status of the virus. So these are the clowns, dolts, and ding dongs that we've sent to Washington to run the richest government on Earth, eh? Well, good luck to us. Hell, it's a wonder things work as well as they do!

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And hey, baseball announcers! The pitcher for the Giants is named Bumgarner, and there ain't no damn “D” anywhere in his name! You got it? So tired of hearing these mouthbreathers call him BumgarDner! I swear these yokels gonna make me triple up on the Xanax during the games Mad Bum pitches in The Series!