My neighborhood got an infrastructure downgrade yesterday. It must be another manifestation of Pawlenty's Minnesota zeitgeist (along with bridges falling apart) that road surfaces go from cracked blacktop to loose gravel. If this is some intermediate step prior to further blacktop/resealing, the Curmudgeon reckons that the phenomenon could be called infrastructure maintenance, but there have been no signs of such thus far. Nope, in this day, it's all about moving backwards- which is the only direction conservatives can really travel. So while observing all manner of vehicle skid, spin, and sometimes flat wipe out on our 21st century gravel streets, several thoughts occur.
This Curmudgeon grew up (and more to the point, learned how to drive) in that soulless stretch of Iowa between Des Moines and Omaha where gravel roads were an essential part of getting from one place to another. It should be noted that the towns, save for the smallest and poorest, didn't have gravel streets, and even then the more traveled streets were paved. Still, learning to drive meant driving on gravel- loose gravel, dry gravel, wet gravel, icy gravel- and a thorough understanding of the interactions of vehicles, motion, and loose rocks proved useful in most any manner of adverse conditions.
Driving on gravel did not, however, provide any meaningful preparation for two of the most adverse driving conditions, which appear frequently in conjunction in the Twin Cities area: too many freaking people on the road, and stupid people behind the wheel. Adding gravel to this mix just makes it all worse.
Speaking of making it all worse, the normally slow and distracted month of August portends neither slowness nor distraction for the area. Despite the ready-made distraction of the the Beijing Olympics (which will distract a great many elsewhere), the metro will be bracing for the dung-flinging culmination of primal subhuman fury that is the RNC convention.
The drum beat of incrementally empowered and self-reinforced right wingers has already begun, a nauseating rhythm of smug lies, racism, and class-warfare (the actual class war, that of the idle rich against the working poor). Rethug minions have already begun defiling the Xcel Cathedral of Hockey, and as the date of the convention draws nigh, more and more of these knuckle-dragging troglodytes will infest the area. All flavours of the drool-and-crayon set: the stupid, the insane, and the evil will set siege in the area, replete with a miasma of self-entitledness, demanding the right to soil themselves and their environs- and be celebrated for such accomplishment.
Witness the increased output of ol' Turkey Flaps: Katherine Kersten's Kolumn. Already a vapid stretch in the increasingly desolate Strib, Turkey Flaps is churning out nothingness in abundance- nothing, that is, except rehashed talking points which have already been proven patently and absurdly false and a virulent strain of racism. The Curmudgeon imagines that by late August, her fevered brain may be so exhausted that her columns will have eroded to nothing but 'ni**er' repeated 400 times (600 times on Sunday).
No, the coming month holds for no respite. This fetid wave of slime will just keep swelling. Tim Pawlenty will have his smug mug set to 'ubiquitous'. Michele "The Breeder" Bachmann has chewed her way through both muzzle and leash, and will continue spouting her alternate reality nonsense in which gay caribou hold coffee clatches on oil pipelines pumping $2/gal gas as she prepares for what she considers her debutante ball. There will be more Coleman-for-Senate ads- even though Coleman cannot run on the issues, or his own character, the scoundrel's last refuge has found a rich vein of material in running against the mostly scurrilous image of the presumed DFL candidate 'Rollover' Al Franken.
(For his part, 'Rollover' Franken is proving himself uniquely capable of snatching defeat from victory. Despite the overwhelming national trend against the political right-wing, despite of amassing an obscene campaign warchest, the Franken campaign has thus far acquitted itself as utterly incapable of meaningful response or effective re-framing. Had the ovine lummoxes who run the DFL endorsing process been perhaps even slightly capable of political foresight, this situation may have been avoided.)
And this veritable parade of rogues will be careening through the loose gravel of a freshly downgraded infrastructure.
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