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.