Slaughterhouse-Two

The rancid, ahistorical regime of Sheriff Dick and Deputy Dubya has now become completely subjunctive; or, as Tweedledee would say: "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't." Got that?

Unable to recognize, admit, or engage present reality deriving from unforced past error, the defunct duo has gone again and again to the future where nothing has happened yet so anyone may freely "report" back to us their time-travelling adventures as if what they only imagine has actually taken place. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, "If ....."

The other day, for instance, George of the Bungle slammed into another rhetorical tree, so to speak, when he "became unstuck in time" (as Kurt Vonnegut said of his fictional character Billy Pilgrim) and told us that "after I'm dead, they'll get it right." As usual, he did not pause to ponder the implications of such a remark, but I immediately grasped its true significance and began another "exploratory" (as You-Know-Her would say) poem with:

He said once he was dead we'd get it right
But since we've got it right, that makes him dead
Which puts some pointed teeth into the bite

Of claims that he has nothing in his head
For whispers softly entering his ears
Come out his mouth with little really said

And what goes in his eyes soon disappears
With no connection made to lights inside
A starless void through which an echo steers

A slope down which the changing stories slide
A lifeless bulb left plugged into a lamp
A disconnected battery that died

For never charging up a single amp
He now deserves his own "rejected" stamp

Dead man walking. Dead man talking. Dead man squawking. Dead man balking. Dead man dead. Yes, I think we've got this wrong man right.

So, now for the necessary replacements. No one should keep dead and worthless employees on the payroll if that means bankrupting the firm. Sometimes even Republicans get tired of the owner's two catatonic sons stinking up the family business boardroom. So, do Dick and Dubya, the Slaughterhouse-Two, go quietly like good little corporate "team players," or do they want to make their exit as messy and midieval as their ruinous, rancorous reign? In the interest of efficiency and economy, then, if not of justice and prudence, we have to make some cuts where the rotten deadwood starts -- like at the top of the prevaricating pyramid.

Trust Billy Pilgrim on this one. He has seen the future and for some reason having to do with red-faced embarrassment, it contains no mention whatsoever of the Slaughterhouse-Two: Richard Bruce Cheney and George W. Bush -- just like those Japanese schoolbooks that whitewash the whole self-inflicted disaster of the Pacific War by saying, in effect: "Japan somehow became unpopular; and then some bad things happened; but the future looks so much better now." Really. The future feels humiliated that we happened, so it has thought best not to mention us at all. The land that forgot time -- again -- thus becomes the land that time has two truly bad and bogus reasons to forget.