I don't know about you, but it was a tough week at the office. Here's a story I'd been following: on the West Coast, 60% of the bee population is missing. Here on the over-achieving East Coast 70% has gone missing. It's called CCD - Colony Collapse Disorder when a bee hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and few immature workers. Sounds like a Gay Pride planning meeting I attended once. Theories about the disappearance involve mites, pesticides, genetically altered foods, global warming and cell phone radiation. I blame everything on this year's premature time change. In the longer light, the bees busied themselves to death. Also Starbucks.
Albert Einstein, and he's one Alberto we can believe, once said that if the bees disappear mankind would have only four years of life left. I'm hoping that CCD will turn out to be an urban legend like that one about the counter clockwise toilet flow south of the equator. I think what we are really witnessing is the collapse of the white male colony. As predicted, it is not pretty.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart to support the ban on partial birth abortion partially paralyzed me. Judge Anthony Kennedy, a man who recently judged a mock trial of Hamlet, a disturbed young man with a sword not a glock, fancies himself quite the writer, and wrote floridly for that damnable 5-4 majority. Next up: honor killings.
Perhaps Kennedy was working out some problems he's been having at home with a regretful woman. Perhaps his wife didn't get her bid on a pear-shaped finial she wanted on e-bay and was horrible to live with for weeks. You know how we get when we're regretful. He's not going to put up with that again. In a co-dependent crisis moment he decides it's the man's job to protect the little ladies from our emotions around abortion, so he won't have to cop to the fact that he's the one who can't deal.
And I can blather like this because it has been The Festival of Amateur Analysis Week from Dr. Sean Hannity to Tucker "With A T" Carlson to Good Grief Counselor Paula Zahn.
Of course I am reviewing my memories of the excitement I felt at Kennedy's lofty writing in our favor, in the Lawrence v. Kansas case, decriminalizing sodomy and overturning Bowers v. Hardwick. Has Kennedy changed? Could it have been all the henpecking he's been getting from that regretful woman at home? More piling on of the amateur analysis. Don Anus must have been relieved this week that the spotlight was off him. That whole sorry episode killed Don Ho.
And thank goodness, empty-headed, incompetent cronyism is confined to the workings of the Justice Department. It is, isn't it? Again I review my memories of other hearings - Watergate, Iran-Contra, Anita Hill, Guantanamo, no wait, did we even have one? - and I have never seen more evidence of white male colony collapse. Perhaps the ban on abortions, combined with abstinence only sex education, is the new army recruiting plan. Brilliant! It's going to be a long war.
Gonzales is the hapless tool at Justice who makes you long for the good old days of Ashcroft. He was called before the Senate committee to answer questions about the possibility of politically motivated firing of eight federal prosecutors. Republicans are worried about voter fraud! That there is not enough of it. The Gonzales hearing was no Mind of Mensa Show. It was like Reagan, the Iran-Contra years. I'm going to try that Gonzales maneuver next week at work. George W gave him a "heckuva job" performance review. If I remember correctly, Alberto will be gone next week.