Quien Es Mas Macho ... Jeff Gannon or Rip Taylor?

Sex. Sex. Sex. On some days you wonder what it all means. And then on some days you actually find out. It's like noticing a gigantic mushroom cloud in your rearview mirror during rush hour traffic, and you're locked into assuming the position for a cruel annihilation that is about to begin. Ka-blam! Total destruction. Nothing more to debate, it's all right there in the fiery gloom.

Some of us live for these moments of supreme clarity, these low-rent and ribald revelations that produce a hot and ruthless moment of total understanding, and on many days I can be found wallowing in the muck with them ... but there are times when I chose to ignore the naked truth. It's not so different than the raw anticipation you feel when inching toward that first decent on a roller coaster, or getting into a violent bar fight. Whoosh! An immediate charge inside your bones, eyes darting and the senses settling on a dull and distant whisper.

Extremism is the sport of deviants and fools. Some of us enjoy the ride, but you really have to want to go there after the first chance at anything.

History is chockfull of these odd and crazed beings. They surface momentarily to remind us that the pathway between man and creature is terribly narrow and then somebody throws a match into the gasoline and the road flare becomes a brushfire, and many times it can't be subdued. The foul scent of terminal perversion overtakes the motives and alibis. It happened to us in the summer of 2004 and it's been reshaped into the Iraqi Governing Council, that "dead can dance" rhumba towards the nuclear problem in Tehran and the administration's crusade to evaporate Social Security in the name of a designer crisis much like WMD. It defined our latest descent into the abyss of corporate dysinformation disguised as fair and free elections. The stretched truth is all part of the public record now; the fix is in.

It's one part Marquis de Sade on a quaalude martini, another part Fight Club, with the rest of us starting to lose our minds, along with a ton of people dying, and suddenly our boyish lad Dubya isn't quite what he was making himself out to be, now, is he? The press nursed him through two rubber-stamped elections, allegations of a cocaine habit the size of Midland, difficulty mixing Jim Beam with a steering wheel and a knocked-up receptionist at best. But Dubya is God's little wonder. His special little creature. You've been warned already, Sparky, and you'll be warned again, while we are forced to watch him bounce around the planet like a wind up toy on speed, just another self-serving testament to high stakes greed. Good old Dubya: Take a real good look at him because he's the archetype for a new American century, perhaps the last in all its gutter ball resplendence. These people who put him there - the freaks from the penthouse office spaces and supremacist think tanks and secret bunkers - it's really no mystery where they come from. We've sharpened the human instinct into a relentless need of marking our time on Earth with every petty desire or base deception or eager addiction, we have manufactured reputations to the size of the Hoover Dam, separated the world by connecting it to endless moments of instant gratification through a cybernetic network of scams and spams, recycled even the dullest and least attractive fads with consolidated house notes that are all coming due, until every living human being becomes an aspiring emperor to his own avidity, and thus becomes his own blueprint for God that the rest of us are forced to wade through daily, just to endure. So, in the end, where else can you go from here? What's left? And while we're hustling from one fabricated plight to the next because we're too overwhelmed with the meaningless details to really notice the build up, who's watching the planet as the air fills with killer particles, the water turns into chunks, and even the fish and vegetables take on the greasy aluminum taste of chemicals? And it's not about to slow down, Sparky. It will disintegrate even faster now, and there's no chance of turning it back ... we'll just keep hedging our bets on the future, or sell a version of what we want the future to look like - flat, filled with fear, religious, insane and paranoid - even when there's no future in the distance. It's Jon Voight and Eric Roberts on that Runaway Train to dawn. And there's now thousands of little Dubyas all giddy and intoxicated about this breakneck race to the future - replacing AD on the Judeo-Christian calendar with AO, for after Osama, because Frank Luntz told them that everything after September 11 was negotiable in "the minds of voters," somewhere in a 4H tent on the outskirts of Terra Haute - trapped in starched white collars or behind the scanner at a convenience store or waiting tables with no purpose or place, but always raised to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires or movie stars or rock and roll icons, while the powers-that-be are getting ready to rape and pillage God's soon to be former-planet and lick their digits clean as they reach for the bloated P/E ratio and a business plan that seems more fist-fuck than pristine. Then you wake up, but just a little too late. You can't buy back the old house note or even shit out the chemical sheen eating away at your intestines - you've been had ... and had hard, Sparky. Your therapist is a serial killer with a "thing" for runaways, your belly is distended from years of ravenous gluttony, your medical doctor is nothing but a dimestore pusher who would rather prescribe than treat, your eyes are bruised shut from the deliberate plastic beating of advertising and over-extended credit, your dick can't get up without ten minutes of porno and half a bottle of Vitamin P, and you're stuck in traffic screaming for somebody - anyone - to show you the light. But guess what? You've rolled the dice one too many times, and gambling is nothing but a tax on stupidity. We're waking up slowly, Sparky. And when enough of us get there - all at once - we're going to discover that we are a very, very pissed off bunch.

But it could be worse. An oxford-wearing, "don't ask don't tell" homosexual with a shaved head could be lobbing softball questions to your preznut in the name of "fairness in media," with a front row seat for this theatre of mass destruction. Not that having a gay man in the White House Press Corp is a problem, but at this rate we might as well contact Howard Stern or Saturday Night Live for a correspondent. Maybe former SNL regular Tim Kazurinsky could re-introduce his line of ice cream delicacies from the Carvel sketch, including "Jingle Buns", "Santa Snowballs", and "Peter, the Yule Log... in vanilla for $4.95, or chocolate for $19.95!"

Babba-booey!

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