Barbara Had the Holster I Needed

[from 11/3/10]

Well, here we go again. I’m writing this Monday morning, the election is tomorrow for me and it’s at least a day ago for you! I hate it when I’m talking to somebody and they know more than I do! The only way I know to cope is to steer the conversation ever so subtly to something I know all about that you don’t.

Let’s talk about games I played when I was six! The games I have in mind are ones that have been rejected in much of our society, namely, shoot-em-up games.

In ‘55 and ‘56, not one person I knew was so civilized as to think it was too violent for kids with cap pistols and fake rifles and assault weapons to pretend to try to kill one another. We had basically three games -- Cops & Robbers, Cowboys & Indians, and War. War should have been Americans & Nazis, but had to be generic Good Guys & Bad Guys. “I’m not gonna be a Nazi! Oh, a Bad Guy? OK.”

What sticks in my mind was what happened when Barbara, the girl who lived downstairs, wanted to play. The only way the guys could allow a girl to play was to make her a noncombatant. But she had to play because I had the hots for her. So she was effectively made Doctor, although her title was Nurse.

Having Barbara be Nurse/Doctor meant each one of us could play more. When we were nearly fatally shot, which we always were, Barbara could fix us. This was done by kneeling beside the casualty, placing hands upon his stomach or chest or head, wherever it was he was experiencing agony, and uttering the words, “Fix, fix, fix, fix, fix...” Five times would usually do it. (Lesser wounds might only require two repetitions.)

There was also an interesting side discussion between Barbara and I about why she didn’t care whether she had a pistol, which was more or less life-changing for me, and made me want very badly to be nearly fatally shot in the groin area, but I’ve already said too much about that.

“What could this possibly have to do with anything that matters to those-of-us who know how the election turned out?” those-of-you might smugly ask.

I’ll tell you. This country, state, county, and city, are all messed up because of years of politicians fixing problems virtually by saying “fix, fix, fix” over and over again.

To get concrete about it, George Bush, who is slightly older than me, and certainly played many cowboys, spent more than 6 years fixing “terrorism” by cutting taxes for the rich and starting two wars. The theory, as you know, was: Cut taxes for the rich, and the economy gets better, everybody else does better (ha, ha, sure they do!), so the tax base improves and you actually end up with more in taxes from having spread all those great jobs around! It’s totally nuts! “Fix, fix, fix!”

It didn’t work. But guess what? The resulting mess is still there and somebody has to fix it. And what do you think they’re going to do about it? What are the odds they’re going to do anything better than saying “fix, fix”?

Another example: We just had a new terrorism scare. Two bombs equipped to detonate by cell phone were literally Fed Ex’ed from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago, and the only reason we stopped them was because somebody among the terrorists snitched in time.

An aspect of this attack that’s not getting much attention is that it demonstrates it’s now possible to Fed Ex bombs anywhere in the world and explode them by long distance phone calls. This technology was gleefully created and installed by your very own Department of Homeland Security and its predecessors, who wanted a way to track you wherever you took your mobile phone! “Fix, fix, fix!”

Good luck to the winners of the election! May they be real Doctors and not the play kind!