Thursday, August 4, 2011

SOLVING THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS

by andrea galvani



Syria...outside intervention...Mr Mubarak 83 remained on a stretcher...a pornography site called Dream Board, child pornography...This is a lose-lose-lose situation...Obama trying to make sense to Republicans that don't pay attention to sense, they want dollars. Dollars only.



Five minutes of headline news. I saw a photograph of Mubarak on Yahoo news locked in his cage like a dangerous man. He may have been dangerous with power, but without his power he is humiliated after a lifestyle with the rich and famous of the world, now seen all over the internet and television in a cage at a kangaroo trial. I have to say I'm with going to the source of the problem, not to some low man on the totem pole all the trouble trickles down to. I can't make any kind of judgment about decisions made in northern Africa. I don't have any idea how they think. I only know that it's very different from the way we think in the American South. I've read several novels by Naguib Mahfouz, a writer I like so much I don't have to look up how to spell his name. Life in Cairo is unlike any I've ever known. I've heard from an American who's been there that Cairo smells like an open sewer.



I'm still feeling good from the midday party at Selma's coffee shop with the different people who came in. If there had been a checklist of who I wanted to be there, I'd have picked all of them. It was a good bunch of people I like an awful lot. We get along together like a gang of friends who have known each other several years. Conversation flows freely. Whenever someone speaks, others listen, and it goes around letting everyone speak and be heard whatever they have to say. That, in my way of seeing, is good company. About all of us, as far as I know, were anti-political correctness. Dudley thinks it's great that I'm as irreverent as he is. He likes having someone else irreverent around. I hadn't thought about it before, but we do tend to make irreverent remarks for humor when we're together. Selma has a good time the other side of the bar fixing coffee drinks and listening to what we're talking about. Sometimes she joins in, but mostly listens with a smile of satisfaction on her face. The smile tells me she is happy that her coffee shop generates such conversations as she hears at the bar when Joe, Dudley, Beth, I and others are making sweeping assessments about that which we know nothing. That's ok. We're doing what Americans do best. Talking. Doing our patriotic duty.



It's really curious having such a European atmosphere in a coffee shop in a small mountain town in the American South. The place has a Latin feel about it like it could be anywhere south of the border where Spanish is spoken. I like that Selma has no hesitation about her Cuban heritage. She's wide open with it. She gives Cuba a good name. She's none too crazy about Castro, while at the same time allowing me my own admiration of Castro for standing up to the American War Machine. He can't be too great when people are trying to get to America riding tractor tire inner tubes out into the ocean at night to be shark food. Nobody is riding an inner tube from Florida to Cuba. That tells me a little bit. Selma's husband made 15 unsuccessful attempts to cross and succeeded the 16th try. For each time he didn't make it he had to do 2-3 months in prison. I'd say he was committed. He looks like somebody who can't be defeated. I'd guess the equivalent of three years in prison, perhaps more, he knows how to fight. I wouldn't recommend going up against him. I'd say his woman feels protected.



My friends Lucas and Judy arrived today from Georgia, Conyers, about the last bedroom community exit off I-20 east of Atlanta. Allen Reinhart here in Alleghany, married to Susan Miles, used to manage a TG&Y store in Conyers. They arrived today refreshed to be in a temperature in the 70s instead of the 90s. Judy said it was unbearable. I expect so. I'm glad to see my friends. They don't seem to have enjoyed their recent visits here, but this time they feel happy to be here, enjoying watching the clouds turn pink from the deck after sunset with wine and conversation. We talked about the venality of the seditious Republicans in our government since the Reagan Revolution, the active hatred for the American people, the bottom 99%. I can't help but laugh at the irony, the ones waving the flag, hollering patriotism, are the enemies of the American republic and its people. Our enemies are not outside anymore. They're inside. And they're not the ones we think. They're the ones pointing the self-righteous patriotic finger.



Syrian troops...Mubarak...device attached to teen not bomb...beaten NC boy, 4, had alcohol in system...72 charged in child porn network...Italy going under...Greece going under again. Who knows where the time goes?



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