Oh! Saroyan...

Too intellectual?

"The Human Comedy" by William Saroyan.

The human comedy indeed. More like the human tragedy.

I keep on drawing the same conclusion. We're doomed. I don't need to read the great Bob Herbert (today's Times Op-Ed...) although I do. He just confirms what I think anyway.

The rich and powerful in this country seem to be having a field day at our expense. We get up, go to work (if we are lucky enough to have a job), try to care for our families and take care of our responsibilities and obligations.

We try to play by the rules of honor and fairness.

But it seems as though we are getting hosed by the people in whom we have entrusted our future and the management of our country.

There are people all over the United States who are on the brink of absolute ruin, of total collapse. There are people who are losing, through no real fault of their own, their homes, their well being, their way of life.

And then, there are others among us, by contrast, who, possibly through chicanery, deception, fraud and outright theft, are drinking champagne from glass slippers and drooling caviar by the mouthful.

The middle class is the new lower class and the lower class is the new poor.

The gabillionaires on Key Biscayne and in Palm Springs and Beach could be cashing in on the greatest fraud in American History.

And we're allowing it to happen. We continue to buy the crap dished out by our politicians, regardless of party. We salute the flag and give away our rights without the least nod to the consequences of our apathy. It seems as though we are being overtaken by the influence of special interest money whether from Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Missile or Big Mouth.

We celebrate the centennial of a man who, by all measure, could have begun the process that put us in this mess at the same time we send to Congress people committed to the possibility of denying the unfortunate, whose lives are defined by poverty and disease, the ability to rise up and out towards a better existence.

And we contemplate electing to the Presidency a woman who, in any other society and at any other time, would have been booed from the stage long ago instead of being elevated to a position of credibilty. But that is no wonder when we idolize the cast of "Jersey Shore" at the same time we defund PBS.

But we may get what we have paid for. The elite may continue their march to supremacy and we may be left to scrounge for the crumbs that could be thrown from the carriages that simultaneously spash us with mud.

But then...Hooray! The tide might turn. History might intervene. Torches might be lit and pitchforks might be sharpened.

The gated communities might be breeched and the scoundrels within might be hung upside down in the town square, their desperate cries potentially drowned out by the sound of their jewlery clanging in the wind.


"HEY! BUDDY! This is the last stop. You gotta get off now. This is the end of the line."

Oh...I was asleep. I must have been dreaming.

Or was I...?