Turn and face the strange

Above video shamelessly stolen from Sadly, No! I'd credit the real author(s), but I have no idea who they are. Sorry.

EVERYbody's doing the We Need Real Deep Serious Change Polka. So, although I never watch David Letterman, here's my Top Ten List of Badly Needed Changes In Government and/or Politics Today, just in case any candidate for office wants to take notes:

10 - We need to stop spending so much money sending poor kids to foreign countries to kill wogs in funny hats, and start spending money on sending poor kids to high schools and colleges which will teach them not to think of their fellow human beings as wogs in funny hats, and especially, not to kill them just because some douchebag told them to.

9 - Let's stop spending money on private schools designed primarily to perpetuate the toxic tribal biases and superstitions of privileged parents on their smug, spoiled offspring, and start spending money making our public education system the greatest place in the world for kids to learn how to think analytically and independently, and through that process, to become civilized, tolerant, enlightened citizens of the modern world and responsible participants in a truly democratic form of government.

8 - Create a free cable channel that is just for campaign ads. Hell, create seven or eight. Pass a law restricting all campaign ads to those channels. Provide a yearly budget for the creation of campaign ads in government studios. A small budget. For small studios. Like a public access channel for political candidates. Then let them gibber and gabble like loons, 24 hours a day, and if you're masochistic enough to want to listen to them, knock yourself out.

7 - Pay all elected officials by the hour. Set their hourly rate at Federal minimum wage x 3, and give them exactly the same benefits package as, say, a woman working in an industrial laundry somewhere in Maryland gets. Sit back and watch how many days they take off, how many half days they work, how often they raise minimum wage, and how quickly they pass some kind of decent national health care package and how efficiently they fix up Social Security.

6 - Any elected or appointed official who thinks the U.S. should use 'enhanced interrogation techniques' has to spend two weeks undergoing same in Gitmo, just like they were a wog in a funny hat their damn selves. If they still think waterboarding ain't torture when they get back to their cushy Washington offices, so fucking be it.

5 - Impeachment is no longer a function of Congress; any elected official can be impeached by public referendum. If a majority of a particular official's constituents wants them out, they go to the polls and vote them out. Watch how fast Bush and Cheney hit the bricks when the American people are the ones handing out the pink slips.

4 - Fix all electoral districts and precincts to independently designated parameters, such as states and counties. And, kind of a subset, when we have elections, let's let everybody who wants to vote do so, and then let's have actual people count all the votes afterwards.

3 - Legalize all the stuff that we all know should be legalized, because it isn't anybody else's goddam business if somebody pays a hooker for sex or smokes a doobe in the privacy of their own home. Put our cops to work preventing and/or solving real crimes, and tax the hell out of all the newly legalized vice traffic.

2 - Sic the IRS, the FBI, the Treasury Department, the NSA, and the CIA on American corporations hiding all their profits in illegal offshore bank accounts. Send some CEOs to Turkey or Egypt for 'enhanced interrogation' if you want.

And the number one change I would like to see made in how our government and/or political system works:

1 - All elected officials, all political appointees, and all candidates for public office are required to wear wireless electrodes on their genitalia at all times. Whenever they say the word 'God' or 'Jesus' or 'Bible' or 'faith' or 'religion' or in any other way invoke their own personal superstitions in an attempt to get votes or reassure the public, I get to push a button sending 50,000 volts straight into their naughty bits. And I get to hold the fucker down for as long as I want to, too. Talk to me about your goddam church NOW, bitchez!

As a final note -- while I'm actually very serious about all of the above (well, maybe not the electrodes), I would like to say this: the last fifteen seconds or so of that YouTube video quite genuinely chill me to the bone. If watching that doesn't tell you that these people are all part of the same elitist club, that none of them actually give a shit about you or anything that's important to you, and that none of them will do a single goddam thing to meaningfully help any of us or hinder the enormous global trainwreck that we are all rushing inevitably towards (and why should they? they'll still be perfectly comfortable in the aftermath of any disaster that could possibly occur), then you can't see the hand in front of your face, which is most likely just about to put a gun to your head.

I wish to... well, I just wish, fervently and passionately, that I thought there was ever going to be a political candidate for high office in my life that I could honestly and genuinely vote FOR, because I honestly and genuinely believed they were trustworthy and would do a decent job once they got into office. I am so sick of voting damage control... but what the hell else can you do?