Friday, August 23, 2013

Never Mind

Talked off the Ledge by B F Koch
ITITY Political Analyst

Every time a bell rings in Texas one of Ted Cruz’s brain cells sprouts tiny little bat wings, escapes his otherwise empty skull, flies around the town hall for a few seconds, then goes on yet another rant about defunding Obamacare.

Secret border patrol agent and part-time cantaloupe inspector, Steve King continues to pile more stupidity on top of a pile of stupid every time his single misfiring neuron comes up with a comment on immigration reform.

A lump of moldy gray matter haunting the halls of justice in a rotten black robe, Antonin Scalia envisions an America where robber barons can once again buy elections and only wealthy old white men are allowed to vote.

Intoxicated with the idea of immortality, and bored with simply being a young Russian billionaire, soon to be cyborg Dmitry Itskov plans on indefinitely extending his lifespan by putting the contents of his cranium in a shiny robot body.

At a lonely, dimly lit bar, Literally and Begs-the-Question, two friends suffering from the modern misuse of language, buy each other drinks and reminisce about the good ole days when their meanings actually had lives.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Breakfast in America

Served by B F Koch
ITITY Arts and Education Editor

Wake up kids, it’s time for breakfast. And you know what they say, you can’t make an omelet without killing half the population of some third-world shithole you probably can’t pronounce or even find on a map, stealing all their resources, and leaving a toxic waste-dump no one can possibly live in where their country used to be. So drink your orange juice and don’t worry, they never complain.

The adults have decided to cut your lunch programs so their rich friends don’t have to pay so many taxes, so eat up. And remember, the ramblings of a Nobel Prize-winning economist divided by zero– which is all you’re going to be left with–is still just irrational gibberish. So don’t be so quick to spend that money the tooth fairy left you. If you want to go to college, you’re going to need it.

Hey, boys and girls, here’s a game you haven’t learned yet called conspiratorial craziness. “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi,” say it out loud three times and the ghost of Richard Nixon will appear. He’ll scare your hamster right out of his cage, and your dog won’t come home for a week, but you can bring him to show-and-tell if you’d like. Just get your mom to sign the subpoena.

Hurry up then, you don’t want to miss the bus. Off to school now, and remember what the teacher said about not smoking near that factory on the other side of the playground fence. And don’t forget your ballistic back packs; you never know when you might get in the way of someone else’s second amendment rights.

So study hard, take those tests, and learn smart stuff because, oh yeah we forgot to tell you, you’ll be in charge of this mess tomorrow. And take the long way home…

Friday, April 19, 2013

Disneyland it Ain’t

Contributed by B F Koch
ITITY Cultural Affairs Correspondent

Along the meandering midway of our abandoned amusement park nation, we see ourselves in mass media fun-house mirrors where talk radio hucksters spin cotton-candy conspiracies and cable news clowns reflect imbecilic confections of fear and suspicion.

On the ramshackle county-fair carousel a restless crowd of backward-baseball-cap rubes, meth-addled moms, and their several-generations-removed-from-the-ability-to-reason offspring, still reach for the brass-ring fantasy that gets further away with each creaking turn.

The sideshow pundits pitch their inbred opinions, the frat boy ex-president paints portraits of puppies, and the fortune teller sees a dark future of foreclosure where grifters in business suits patiently circle like buzzards in the grey sky above.

A chainsaw sculptor turns a piece of dead tree into a trailer-park totem, while down at the derelict arcade of bankrupt dreams the proud tattooed-and-pierced percent desperately try what’s left of their luck at a rigged game of chance they’ve already lost.

America, the exceptionally banal, heck-of-a-job country you’d like to have a beer with, a raucous carnival of corruption that refuses to fold its tent, where the lines are all long, the rides are all rusty, and if you try to cut in, you’ll likely get shot.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Empire of Emptiness

Dispatched by B F Koch
ITITY Current Events Columnist



Heartland USA

From our oppressive foreign policy, to simple disputes over parking spaces, we are a country increasingly incapable of controlling our aggressive inclinations, where the disaffected, potentially dangerous, individual is only dimly discernible amid the mindless search-for-a-motive-reveals-only-madness momentum of everyday American crazy.

Throughout our violent winner-take-all history we have been comfortably unwilling to confront the needless suffering of countless souls caused by the conquest of other cultures, yet are still shocked when the promise of a more perfect union is periodically shattered by the awful anguish of our own homegrown horrors.

We continue to contest the meaning of a cryptic passage on a piece of old parchment, steadfastly clinging to our fictionalized flintlock-over-every-fireplace frontier past, while facing a desperate future in a suspicious stand-your-ground shadow of a society where fearful people live separate lives across a lonely locked-and-loaded landscape of pervasive paranoia.