And to us the spoils

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed
Their kids won’t bleed in the dad’s little war
And we can’t make it here anymore

Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Let ’em eat jellybeans let ’em eat cake
Let ’em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps
If they can’t make it here anymore

And that’s how it is
That’s what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you’re listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why

In Dayton, Ohio
Or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That’s done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There’s rats in the alley
And trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can’t make it here anymore

James McMutry

(he wrote this several years ago, btw, and this isn’t the whole song…)

Fahrenheit 212

Lately around the casa things have been more than a little stressfull.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate it around a 14.

(as an aside, why couldn’t the physicist who proposed the temperature
scale back 300 years ago have had an easier to spell surname? I mean,
really. Is it too hard to have somebody named Fischer or Schmidt or
something? Anyway)

Most of this is My Fault ™ but that isn’t helping me much. I
seem to be paralyzed an unable to move, like I’m bogged down in a swam
(see also: Iraq Liberation).

My son and I have stopped screaming at each other in the mornings, for
the most part. Still blew up on Saturday night in a lovely little
episode that had me returning one of his video games (at a huge loss)
and the entire Playstation system shoved in a closet for an indefinite
amount of time. Yeah, I’m proud of THAT, let me tell you. But he
worked on his homework yesterday, in hopes of seeing some of the big
basketball game tonite (and I STILL haven’t filled in my brackets, but
I think I can at least get some of them right).

My wife’s birthday was probably the crappiest birthday I’ve given her
in years (although I’m sure she’ll correct me on this point, I’ve
probably just blocked out the crappier ones for obvious reasons). I
made her a cake, which was yummy, and tried to make buttercream icing,
which was not so yum, but edible. Other than that we went to church
(stress!) and cleaned house and did a mountain of laundry (and there’s
still more to do) and she even cooked her own dinner while I was doing
something else (I think laundry related but now I’m not sure).

I think the parenthetical taxation people will be looking for me, so
perhaps I should end this here. No point, really, just venting.

Oh, here’s a funny. Overheard my son asking my wife (we get these
kinds of questions more often than you think):

Him: Mom, would it hurt more if you were shot in the spleen or in the privates?

Her: um, well, you can live without your privates, not so much without
a spleen. (I must add: she’s obviously female, I’d probably give it a
try the other way around)

Him: You mean, like girls? Because they don’t have privates.