TV News LIES

Like in the United States, it's federal election campaign season up here in Canada. This time around the campaign will drag on for … 78 days. The average length of the past 10 campaigns prior to 2015 was 45.8 days. The standard is 37 days.

How do Canadians feel about a protracted 78 day campaign? Bob Brown, interviewed in The Calgary Herald, called the move “ridiculous,” but one that wouldn’t benefit any of the three parties in the long run. “I don’t see how issues can be dealt with any greater in three months than they can in 30 days. There are only so many issues. What do you accomplish by running that discussion out over three months?”

Lies are marketing's best friends, just as Desire is the single best pal consumption ever had.  Combine Lies and Desire, along with a hurried, staggering set of lunges and lurches to pick up any dangling or loose minutes or seconds in the evaporating days of our lives, and you've got a toxic cocktail -- one we call American Life.

We are about to have more American Life on Thursday, during a gathering not of eagles, but of turkeys, vultures, and turkey vultures.  (It used to be a dog-eat-dog world in politics.  Now, it is about rabid dogs biting one another, and themselves, and chewing their feet, chasing their tails, then springing out into the audience in search of unguarded jugulars.)

On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities, the United States  dropped a nuclear weapon nicknamed "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima , Japan.  This attack was followed on August 9 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. To date, these are the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare.

When the bombs were dropped I was very happy. The war would be over now, they said, and I was very happy. The boys would be coming home very soon they said, and I was very happy. We showed ‘em, they said, and I was very happy. They told us that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, and I was very happy. But in August of 1945 I was only ten years old, and I was very, very happy.

Sometimes, when I remember, and when I am trying to be polite (despite being mightily peeved at something or other), I will exclaim "Bolshoi!" instead of shouting the name of the food that comes out of bulls, after the bulls are all done with it.

It's a few semi-tasteful steps removed from the more obvious "Oh, bullcrap!"  Plus, I'd like to think that this small effort on my part helps the people around me keep some calming distance between that particular nitrogen-fixer and their own finer sensibilities.

OK, I know I'm all done here, but I was just passing through, and I have a visual I simply have to share with you.

It's a tale of all the ugly Presidential ducklings fielded by the GOP -- one of them, anyway.  (There's not enough space for all their many misadventures, as the GOP has so darned many handbaskets, and duckings, all headed straight to Hell, and none of those ducks are all in a row.)

Anyway:  It was a recent photograph in the hopefully-terminal coverage of that quack, The Donald.  His picture was taken with him behind a podium of some sort, up on a dais.  The photographer was apparently below, aiming the lens upward, in order to have gotten that shot.

Here we go again:  I freely admit I have backtracked, softening my previous, hard-line pledge to ignore the current rerun of clowns-n-circuses at the media's sleazy carny show.  Yet, here I am again, enjoying the bread-n-circuses spectacle of hyperbolic GOP candidates already frothing at the lip-line, competing in a Presidential election still a far cry -- although a much nearer, full-blown panic -- down the road.

The thing is:  This is a lot like exploring a fingertip with tweezers, tracking a wily, elusive splinter you'd swear was actively avoiding you.  It's like getting all the sun-baked duct-tape residue off a glass-fronted storm door.  It's like chasing cancer around your body with glowing Mad Scientist Rays and Big Pharma's Top 100 Greatest Hits:  These things are all theoretically possible -- even technically possible --just be ready for some DEFCON-2-level pains in the patootie, the temples, and elsewhere.