and, no, i’m not talking about our commander in chief, i’m talking about me.
and my complete ignorance as regards professional sports.
on friday someone asked me, ‘so what are you doing for super bowl sunday?’
to which i replied, ‘uh, when is super bowl sunday?’
it was yesterday, huh.
i had no idea. but someone just told me that the colts played the bears, right?
i’ve written about this before, but when i was really young(aka-pre-adolescent) i was utterly and disturbingly obsessed with professional sports.
i had a subscription to the sporting news, and when my favorite teams would play i would make scorecards and statistics sheets of my own and i could tell you the most unnecessary and arcane things about almost anyone in professional sports.
but then, like the overquoted robert frost poem, two paths(or one path?)diverged in the woods and i took the one as previously travelled by david bowie and john lydon and ian curtis and kraftwerk(aka-music instead of reading the sporting news cover to cover every week, as i did when i was 9. yes before being a music nerd/political nerd i was a sports nerd. well, unless ‘sports nerd’ is oxymoronic enough to be meaningless).
i did go to a super bowl party a few years ago, and i think that i was an embarassment to just about everyone in the room by asking questions like: ‘the raiders are from l.a now? such and such city has a football team? you can score points by doing that?’
ok, and now some politics.
see? i’m sneaking the politics in after something innocent, like how i didn’t know that yesterday was super bowl sunday.
so…gw bush’s budget?
very simply: a big increase in the defense budget, a big increase in money for iraq and afghanistan,
and huge cuts in domestic spending.
personally i think that he’s just being petulant cos his approval ratings are so low.
i imagine his thinking to be something like: ‘fine, if the american people don’t like me, then i’ll give their tax money to defense contractors and people in iraq and afghanistan.’ somewhat akin to the ‘well, if you won’t invite me to your party then i’ll take my ball and go play with the other kids.’
i mean, seriously, cutting education and health-care and emergency services in the united states so that we can spend more money on defense and oil-production in iraq?
do you think on his last day in office(or before he’s impeached)gw bush and dick cheney will say, ‘oh, and by the way, we REALLY hate americans. please forward our mail to riyadh.’
you have to admit that it’s a little bit(ok, a lot of bit)weird to cut domestic spending so that you can spend more overseas and on the defense budget(which is currently higher than the defense budgets of china, western europe, japan, and southeast asia COMBINED).
-moby
