What the heck do we care
Kiddie Matinee. It cost eleven cents to get in, a quarter if you were twelve. Bud Davis used to walk out on the stage to cheers and applause and lead the crowd of screaming kids in our theme song every Saturday morning at the Ritz Theatre:
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here
What the heck do we care
What the heck do we care
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here
What the heck do we care now.
Interesting living into a nation that is so changing so strangely, so dismayingly. More apt than interesting, dis-easing. Or leave out the hyphen and say it, disease. I wonder if America was like this in the late 1850s and 1860s, if people hated each other so. If northern sympathizers in the South and southern sympathizers in the North feared a knock on the door and opening to someone with a badge or a crowd with a rope. Why such anger, such hatred of those whose view is different, opposite? And not piously above the fray wagging a finger, I’m looking in the mirror. Whom and why do I hate? I detest the permanent political elite, the establishment, the ensconced whose skills are nil but noise and whose idol is re-election. I despise politicians who own a system in which the term “loyal opposition” is an archaic joke that’s not funny or humorous, but tragicomic. Where loyalty is not to serve national wellbeing but to self, to hindrance, to obstruction. And though my contempt is
That’s what I see. America the Saturday Matinee. A black and white cowboy movie. The three stooges.
D.Thos+