Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

It’s a tough world, y’all. Muslims may don blackface to imitate your president. Asians insist on having complicated names. Adorable comic actors are rationalizing date rape.

The press is taunting vegetarians and calling our concerns for the planet pretentious and tiresome, which probably assures us of some kind of Al Gore-type told-you-so status in the coming years, but still.

Plus, it turns out pirates are kinda sympathetic, after all.

And the courageous and outspoken director of LSU’s Hurricane Center, who refused to be silent about the criminal neglect committed against the residents of New Orleans by the Army Corp of Engineers, has finally been fired by the University. BushCo, even though out of office, has a long reach indeed.

A unique symbol of the American Revolution is being co-opted by corporations and the lobbyists and think tanks that shill for them, as citizens born without the sense god gave a goose cheer them on.

Our president struggles well to make himself heard and to be the thing that keeps our bloated and half-drowned asses from going under for the last time. And for his efforts, he is ridiculed by terrible people who seem to have no problem with the fact that they are, or might become, the inspiration for awful, pointless violence.

I love my country dearly, and I am sorely tired of pointing this out to those that believe that they can only gain for themselves at the expense of others. The world is corrupt, foolish, and reckless, and becoming more so every day, it seems. Is it any wonder that at last Friday’s wonderful, amazing, heartbreaking Leonard Cohen concert, the following poem cut through my skin and into my soul like a hot knife through Chinese drywall?

Thank you, Uncle Lenny.