Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That’s how it goes. Everybody knows. — Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016
This here news junkie has become so sick of the 24/7 Donald Xi Putin Show that I’ve cut back viewing. Cartoon violence on standard TV shoot-em-ups is often quite preferable to reality.
Perhaps there’s an upside to this over-saturation of servitude to power-besotted psychos.
The signs in the heavens (cough, hack!) are pretty clear that Mother Nature is sending her spoiled brats a serious warning thru the muck and mire: Get fixed or get gone.
Barbwire-ites know of my simple solvent for the Herculean task of clearing the Augean stables of current humanity: Women. In command.
Period.
Long before writing became popular, there were countless predictions of Armageddon. One of my erstwhile talk radio listeners even gave me a copy of “A History of the End of the World.” This came as the world trembled that Saddam Hussein could use (non-existent) nukes against Bush the Elder’s invasion to protect the Lone Star royal family’s Persian Gulf drilling rights.
Same fears abide today, only worse, as many nations actually possess the nuclear button.
So maybe we stand at the apotheosis, the apogee, the highest point, the culmination of…what, exactly?
Exactly. We either climb to new heights of enlightenment, or crash down, smothered under various clouds of the mushroom, fire or ozone varieties. Pick your poison.
Meanwhile, moonhowlers meander over the nit-pickety small. Should Washoe County school children be exposed to the words “penis” and “vulva”?
Doesn’t much matter to little kids without enough to eat or roofs over their heads.
This tiny blue picayune pixel of a planet, in the tick of time occupied by our species’ sentience, doesn’t matter all that much.
Yet.
Today, we have arrived at a point prepared to soar into a sparkling age in which there is no war, no want, no wantonness.
Where science and art synergize into a symphony of wonder and achievement.
Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.
We have matured to a point where we actually control our collective futures, forward or backward, to the garden or to the graveyard.
“The world is in an uproar. The danger zone is everywhere.” So warned Ray Charles in 1962, a bluesy predictive parable for the parabola of our arc on this watery ark.
Artists and philosophers have been trying to show us the way for millennia.
Are we finally ready to grow up? For every Jacinda Ardern there be a plethora of guys with guns.
The former New Zealand prime minister gave birth while successfully protecting her country from the COVID plague while puerile pubescent boys were playing target practice around the globe.
I may be a born critic, but I am eternally a guarded optimist with abiding faith in humanity’s resilience.
Look at our newly immortal media magicians. Tony Bennett overcame many pronouncements of the demise of his career to become an international and American icon.
Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman) rose above ridicule and vilification, as did Sinead O’Connor.
All three recently departed awesome artists demonstrated how history will judge you kindly if you practice kindness to others, no matter the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
They were all living examples of the old Texas football axiom: dance with who brung ya to the ball.
Translation: Stick to what you’re best at, then fortune will smile upon you.
Which is why we live within what may well prove our finest or fatal hour: We have the ability to rise with our wonders or fail with our faults.
The ultimate in pro-choice.
¡Sí se puede!
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, MississippiWestNV.org and Rentvolutionv.org, among others. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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