"Cultural fault lines" and "cowpies" will be part of the terminology I'll be using in the future, particularly when writing about politics.
Cultural fault lines are areas where the planes of our culture are misaligned, causing minor tectonic shifts to occur. If you see something happening where the facts don't seem to add up, you may be straddling a cultural fault line.
One minor example: About thirty years ago, rock musician Ted Nugent performed a song he'd written called "Stranglehold." This is one of the best hard-rock electric guitar performances I've ever heard. Nugent has never done anything since that amounted to much, but for a while he was one of my cultural icons based on "Stranglehold."
Nugent more or less dropped out of sight as the 1970s ended, and when he reappeared, it turned out he's a serious gun freak, a real NRA poster boy. That's okay by me, but additionally, Nugent is an extremely hardcore right-winger. The kind who thinks Sean Hannity is "a Great American" and does personal appearances for Rick Perry. Gee whiz. Nugent was a rock musician back in the seventies, so maybe this is the result of years of substance abuse. Nope. Nugent claims to be proud of his drug-free past.
The guy who played "Stranglehold" shouldn't end up being just another Republican chickenhawk. We already have plenty of those.
A more important cultural fault line is in the area of "Supporting The Troops."
For years, "supporting the troops" has been the mantra of politicians in both parties. If you criticize banjo boy, you're not supporting the troops. If you think taxes should be increased to pay for the war, you're not supporting the troops. If you think the president shouldn't be allowed to ignore the law any time it suits him, you're not supporting the troops. Everything, we're led to believe, should revolve around supporting the troops. In itself, there's nothing wrong with that.
Positive results of the war are hard to find, but one negative result is an alarming number of soldiers leaving Iraq with serious wounds, amputations, or brain injuries. Making matters worse is emerging evidence that "support for the troops" hasn't included funding to ensure that the medical attention they get is uniformly world-class, or in some instances, even adequate. Another cultural fault line.
Cowpies. If memory serves, I first heard that word as a little boy during visits to the farms owned by my grandfather and uncle. I was warned not to step in the cowpies in the barn or the pasture.
On the farm, there were a lot of cows and chickens. Flies and manure were everywhere. In that respect, the farm was much like Washington DC is today.
In a recent post, I complained that commenting on politics without using profanity was challenging. After thinking about it, I realized that "cowpies" is an inoffensive expression that I can use to summarize my opinion of the stuff coming out of DC and Austin.
Do you know what the Iraq war is costing us ? Neither do I. From what I can tell, neither does anyone else. Not really.
Today, I did a Google search: "dollar cost per week iraq war"
The first thing I learned was that much of the online information on this topic is several years old. One of the more recent articles was in the Kiplinger business report. This source estimated the costs at roughly 300 million dollars a day, or 10 billion a month. A somewhat older story at MSNBC put the daily cost at 250 million, or 1.8 billion per week.
No matter what numbers you choose, we're spending a pocketful of change on this enterprise. If you do the math, the war is costing more money per minute than most people live on for a whole year. Cowpies.
As Jerry Lee Lewis used to say, think about it.
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