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real-life villains never do this
Monday, April 14 2003
Today Gretchen flew off to Pittsburgh to attend the funeral of the father of her sister-in-law, Jen. Meanwhile I went out on an errand to replenish our barren liquor cabinet (part of the price of having a house-sitter - I would have done the same). While I was out I also bought a bunch of treated lumber with which to extend the deck in the rear of the house. I want to connect it up with the dining room sometime before the wedding, but to do that I have to build a six-foot-long catwalk and replace a window with an exterior door. Pressure-treated lumber is unpleasant material to handle. I was a little concerned about just picking up the boards with my bare hands. The substance used to preserve the wood is arsenic.
Today I found myself growing infuriated - but also sort of death-in-the-family depressed - about the disturbing reports of uncontrolled looting and vandalism at Baghdad museums while our unconcerned troops are off guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Such cultural callousness reflects the priorities of the present administration, whose concern for works of art extends only to the issue of whether or not a breast is showing. What do five thousand year old calendars matter when the Rapture is imminent? You can add complicity in the destruction of priceless Babylonian artifacts to other important Bush administration artistic milestones: the shrouding of Justice, the cloaking of Guernica, and the snubbing of poets.
Hollywood movies have trained me to subconsciously expect Bush and his cronies to eventually reveal their diabolical motives in some decisive moment of crisis. Sadly, though, real-life villains never do this. They just keep adding to the misery of the world until a suitable counterforce rises to compensate. Only then are the specifics of the diabolical machinery exposed, but it's all third person and by then too late for this information to do anything but contribute to the book of history, to be unread even in Cliff NotesTM form by the future George W. Bushes of the world.
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