Priorities

Did you happen to catch the CBS Evening News last night, Bush? I expect not. You're on vacation down there in Crawford, Texas, and probably don't have time for such things anyway. Even in the regular course of events, I have to say, it sometimes seems as though you don't keep up with the news very much--though I guess CBS is not the best way to do it, right? Case in point, last night: with all the trouble and strife and turmoil affecting countless millions of people throughout the world, guess what they lead with on CBS? The BTK killer in Kansas! Major headline news, his sentencing trial. New sensational details of what he did to whom, and how he did it. Horrible, I grant you. But headline news?

We're back to priorities, Bush. It seems to me often that, as a country, ours are terribly skewed as of this moment in history. When you shell out billions each month for your war and your military research and development while children go hungry in the streets of America, people suffer and die from lack of affordable medical attention, and our education system keeps slipping closer and closer to the bottom of the heap among the wealthy countries of the world. Not to mention the slow but steady erosion of our cultural interests and values. My God, look at the list of summer movies, Bush! Take a look at how our kids' aesthetic values are being formed, with wideo games and television fare! And meanwhile we develop our arsenal of those weapons of mass destruction you're so busy castigating others for.

Priorities. They say a lot about us, and not much of it good. I watch you pandering to the "moral values" of brainless fanatics who believe the world was created in six days, and I have to wonder: is this man really so willfully ignorant as to believe this nonsense? And this is the man this country chose to lead us forward into the twenty-first century?

As for my own priorities, Bush, it must be obvious that our daily conversations are suffering somewhat at the moment from the contingencies of life. I was brief with you yesterday because I was preoccupied with real estate and construction matters up in town. I'll be brief again today because there's so much else I have to catch up with, and my mind is filled with other things. I woke this morning unable to think of anything but the possibility that our old house might have rats in the attic... and what to do about them. So, as Walter Cronkite used to say on the old CBS, before it fell victim to the entertainment business: "That's the way it is."

Take care, Bush. I might have more consequential thoughts for you tomorrow.