A Dallas Moment

by

Some of you may remember the TV prime time soap drama,  Dallas. JR Ewing and his family were Texas oil millionaires with dysfunctional relations rarely seen in real life. One of the plot lines for a whole season occurred after one of the actors (Patrick Duffy, who played Bobby Ewing) left the show, and was not part of the TV family. At the end of the season, he must have missed his paycheck, and asked to be brought back, so the next season began with Bobby’s wife waking from a dream (and he in the shower) with this dream being the entire past season without him. All the viewers smacked their foreheads and thought “WTF?”, but then the show continued with him for a number of seasons, so it apparently didn’t affect the false reality created by the show.

Now consider the following:

  • Texas is going to execute an clearly mentally ill inmate, but before doing so, they are going to force him to take his anti-psychotic medications so that he’s capable of appreciating the fact that the state is going to kill him. Texas, of course, leads the country in death penalty executions, executing more than half as many than all of the other states and the Federal Government combined, since 1976.
  • Republicans in Congress, for the better part of the year 2011, did absolutely nothing constructive for which they were voted into office, instead opting to create legislative gridlock, at one point threatening to shut the government down, resulting in the first downgrade in America’s credit rating. They accomplished the latter by refusing to allow a perfunctory debt ceiling increase, something that was routinely done in the past, by more cooperative legislatures..
  • Michelle Bachmann ran for President of the United States during a year in which the legitimacy of the sitting President was questioned, based on whether he was a proper citizen of the United States. Michelle Bachmann recently disclosed that she has been a dual citizen of the US and Switzerland since 1978, something she sorta forgot to tell us during the campaign.
  • Rush Limbaugh has criticized Obama (along with just about every other rabid right wing commentator) for “waging a war” on marriage by endorsing equality in marriage for gays. His first, second, third and fourth wives could not be reached for comment. Nor were any of Newt Gingrich’s three wives available either.
  • Instead of an independent Fourth Estate, a free press beholden to no-one, we now have a major news outlet, FOX, that is the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican Party, which itself is no longer a true political party, i.e. one that espouses a different, yet valid, mainstream political philosophy, but instead increasingly advocates only more and more extremely irrational capitalism and theocracy.
  • A recent viable candidate for the Republican nomination was a pro-life ex-Senator who hypocritically favored a Constitutional Amendment to ban all abortions, including those that might save the life of the host-mother, while he made the decision to abort his own child to save the life of his wife.
  • One of the most self-righteous arbiters of morality in the history of mankind, The Roman Catholic Church, is full of child-raping pedophiles, while the current head of that organization once lead the internal section that was charged with covering up the crimes of all the priests caught diddling their young, male flock.
  • Republicans (yes, them again) continue to blame the sitting President for the economy, the recession, the lack of jobs, the continuing war in Afghanistan, the mortgage crisis, the war on Christmas, global warming cooling, high gas prices, too much spending, not enough spending, even their own obstructionism, and the clubbing of baby seals, though it was his predecessor who was responsible for all of them. Except the wittle baby seals. That was John Boehner.
  • I paid an effective tax rate this past year of about 30%. Mitt Romney who made something like 500 times what I made, in one year, paid an effective tax rate of 14%.
  • There seems to be an incredible increase in really pernicious legislation attempting to control the bodies of women, just in the past year, requiring constant monitoring and resistance from pro-choice groups. This appears to be pressed by Republicans at the state level, since the federal laws are beyond their reach in a divided legislature. From trans-vaginal sonograms (Virginia) to cutting funds to Planned Parenthood (Arizona), with scurrilous attacks on the sidelines by half-wit radio personalities, it seems like the tactic is to flood the country with obnoxious restrictions, thinning the resources of the pro-choice forces, and making it difficult to prevent some of the legislation from being enacted.
  • The Tea Party… ‘Nuff said.

Did I say something about a false reality?

I’m hoping that on November 7 I’ll wake up and have a Dallas moment, where I turn on the TV, find that Obama is President and that the past year or so has just been a dream. Where:

  • We celebrate, not vilify, Roe v. Wade as a turning point in our culture…
  • Texas has done away with the death penalty, like Connecticut just did…
  • Republicans openly seek compromise on their political differences with Democrats, and actually attain them…
  • Obama invites Ted Nugent to perform at the White House, and Nugent accepts graciously, and shows up without his guns…
  • Michelle Bachmann divorces her husband after finding out his gay conversion clinic was a sham and a fraud, and he’s been hiding money in a Swiss Bank account since 1979, AND he admits that he’s always been gay (not that that’s a bad thing)…
  • News Corp and FOX files for Chapter 7 protection, and Rupert Murdoch is forced to liquidate all of his holdings after shutting down all his media outlets…
  •  Pope Benedict admits in a civil lawsuit that he protected pedophile priests, resulting in a multi-trillion dollar civil judgement, collectable against all the Vatican assets…
  • …and I’m one of the Plaintiff’s class action attorneys…

{sigh}. I guess that’s why they call it a dream.