More Bionic Horses

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Malcolm Reynolds from FireflyAt times like these civilized society needs more celebrities and swindlers like it needs a pudding can without a pull tab. They promise you sweet chocolaty goodness, but then stiff you when the cows come home.

In past posts I’ve written about the sustainable ethics of such outlaw heros as Bo and Luke Duke and Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. And it still stands true, what we need today are outlaws with a heart of gold — bad guys who make us want to be good. But where have they gone? (click here to jump ahead to the punchline.)

In a day and age too glib for good guys to survive and too corrupt for the general populous to continue its complacency, we need these law-flauting, damsel-rescuing, firebrands more than ever, and yet… where can we turn?

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Potty Training Wall Street

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I smell like urine. Everything smells like urine. My fiercely brave wife and I have been potty training our 3 year old son for the last few days. (He’s doing well, by the way.) And I can’t help but feel like my son has mastered something in three days that people in our political and financial centers still haven’t figured out — namely, how to read and control base urges in order to avoid pissing all over everything.

It’s pretty amazing, really. (Both that my son is a genius and that so many career sorts still need newspaper spread around everywhere they go.) A few days ago my little boy was just letting it rip whenever the urge hit (a sensation I haven’t experienced since going tubing a few years ago). Now he’s registering the impulse to wiz mentally and cuing his little body to beeline for the toilet before doing so.

Yet, around our fair land, a noticeable percentage of the people in charge of leading us and forecasting our fates seem to have relapsed.

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Occupy This! Wall Street & Reality TV

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Tis the season for occupation. And why not? I’m occupying my chair as I type. From Wall Street to Walmart, I say it’s time for hardworking and hard-complaining American citizens to get to occupying.

The only problem I keep running into is that I don’t know how to occupy an ideal or a concept. I’d love to occupy greed or corruption in order to break it’s will, bust it down to mere covetousness, slap it around a little and toss it to the curb. But it’s not exactly like occupying a Honey Bucket. There’s no latch on the door that switches from ‘vacant’ to ‘occupied’ (as far as I can tell).

But then again, it’s not like Wall Street or corporate greed or whatever entity we’re invading was actually vacant to begin with. So I guess what we’re talking about here is a relocation program of some sort–removing half of the venture capitalists and day traders to replace them with what? Dissidents? Hippies? That hardly seems any better. We can’t have the trading floor resounding with “Sell! Sell! Kill! Kill! while the rest of the group gets the munchies, now can we?

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