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hatchback dissection day two Friday, April 18 2008
Today while I was slowly draining gas out of the hatchback's tank using the fuel line that had once connected it to the engine, a neighbor came by to shoot the shit about the accident. He drives up and down Dug Hill Road more than most neighbors and had even been at the accident scene before the damaged cars had been towed away. It was car damage show and tell, with him seeing for the first time what deployed airbags look like. Then he showed me the dent a deer had installed in the hood of his Volkswagen.
I was only able to get five gallons of gasoline out of the hatchback before air bubbles started appearing in the gas line and I had to abandon my siphoning, even though I knew there were five more gallons in that tank. It seems Honda has installed methods to thwart all possible methods of gas recovery.
This evening Gretchen and I watched Machuca, a dramatization of the turmoil of Chile's 1973 coup from the perspective of a privileged young boy named Gonzalo and Machuca, another young boy who gets a scholarship to Gonzalo's exclusive school as part of an outreach program it undertakes to underprivileged children living in a nearby shantytown. As the film opens, Chile has been living under three years of socialist rule of Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected president of the country. Not everything is peaches and cream under Allende; there are food lines and continuous protests, both by the wealthy opposed to Allende and the poor (who happily wave Soviet flags).
Watching the brutality of the Chilean coup and its aftermath, I was reminded that the American henchman responsible for the coup's success: Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, among others, were never held accountable. Some of those folks (you know their names) would go on to fuck up the world in bigger and more permanent ways (first Iran-Contra, then the second invasion of Iraq), never being called to account or suffering demotion for their crimes and poor decisionmaking. People who can't wait tables end up bussing them, so why doesn't this country have a policy of sending its failed bureaucrats back to school, where they can learn to safely operate deep fryers, pruning shears, and paint rollers?
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