Queen Marie

"..and love is a thing that can never go wrong
and I am Marie of Rumania."

Dorothy Parker wrote that. It's about delusion bordering on insanity. I used to be pretty deluded. Now I'm just cynical.

For example, I was raised to believe that all American politicians were country-born altruists who were routinely dragged, kicking and screaming, off of their farms and forced to do service for their constituents and the country by sitting in Congress, or otherwise tending to the business of the Nation.

I based this idea on some movie I saw when I was six which starred Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. I'm pretty sure that was the gist of the plot.

Later on, because I lived just a hop, skip and a jump away and used to visit the place a lot, I somehow or other glommed onto the idea that everybody in Philadelphia in 1776 would much rather have been back home with the wife, kids and slaves on their farms and/or plantations in Massachusetts or Virginia, than sitting around in Foul, Fetid, Foggy, Filthy, Philadelphia, fomenting rebellion against the British Crown.

But I might've been wrong about that.

Then I grew up. And I found out about things like McCarthyism. And HUAC. And Viet Nam and Nixon and Watergate and Dirty Tricks and Lee Atwater and "pandering to the base" and "collateral damage" and smear campaigns and Jack Abramoff and the Religious Right and Fox News and Monica Lewinsky and campaign finance.

And now I don't believe a damn thing any lying SOB who dwells inside the beltway (or would like to) and sucks a living out of the people (or would like to) tells me.

Not a single, solitary word.

It's a little over a month until our next national election.

Between now and then you shouldn't believe a single, solitary word they tell you, either. No matter how pretty, or delightfully suprising, it might sound.

Otherwise, I might be forced to start calling you "Marie of Rumania."

Which would be just one deluded fools opinion, of course!