When Angry Apes Fall Down

An Internet acquaintance captured the essence of American "government" today when she correctly noted:

"We do our 'diplomacy' by headlines ..."

The American government does just about everything else that way, too.

Americans now have (and have had since 2001) a trashy troupe of second-rate snake-oil salesmen playing the part of politicians in a TV soap opera. Deputy Dubya's Rasputins, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, have turned practically the entire federal bureaucracy into a campaign ad agency producing little but 24/7/365 commercials for themselves and their corrupt cronies.

A look beneath the headlines (like a peek behind Oz's Emerald City curtain) reveals only the little wrinkled frauds who hunker in their bunker-bubbles "working the levers," as Barbara Tuchman called their energetically empty illusion-mongering.

How our very own "fallen down" can speak of "standing up" anyone else would make us laugh if it hadn't already reduced so many of us to weeping in abject humiliation.

Or, as Shakespeare had Isabella cry out for her doomed brother's life in "Measure for Measure":

" ... but man, proud man!
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who with our spleens
Would all themselves laugh mortal."

With our very own angry-ape "leaders" falling down all over the place and blaming it on somebody else, we should marvel that our own spleens haven't yet ruptured at the fantastic spectacle of their transparent tricks.