Now, I know Senator Bernie Sanders is a self-declared soshalist and therefore must be ignored at all costs, but who else can you trust to bring up an indecorous subject like poverty in America? Just as soon as you can find the time between sips of Chardonnay and truffle-bites, have a look at his Huffpost article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/is-poverty-a-death-senten_b_960598.html. Nothing so sickens me as the virtual banishment of the very words "poor" and "poverty" from American political discourse. The only class-based reference permitted is to "the middle class." Now, most of us know that the term mostly refers to working-class stiffs who are merely deluding themselves about their true standing and prospects in contemporary America, but let's leave that aside since it's a commie idea and we don't want to upset the delicate feelings of any of our dear brothers and sisters the 'Baggery who might stumble upon this Marxist-sociopath den of intellectual iniquity that is the SWASH ZONE.
I'm not in the mood for windy analysis this evening as I just want to watch a Shakespeare DVD and go to bed alongside the Jurassic Watering Hole. (By the way, director Julie Taymor – who has already done a brilliant modern version of the revenge play Titus Andronicus, has a new production of The Tempest coming out on DVD towards the end of the year, starring Helen Mirren as "Prospera." That should be excellent – strangely, we don't have enough versions of The Tempest, which is, along with Twelfth Night, among the Bard's most beloved plays.) So I'll just suggest the following as a dino-scriptum to Senator Sanders' much cleverer post; to America's fond supporters of the nearly taxless megarich and the infinite perfection of The Market, verily I say,
"Everybody else loves you, but Jesus thinks you're an a**hole" (Matthew 19:24).
How's that for the perfect bumper-sticker as a riff on the persnickety atheist ones that run, "Smile. Jesus loves you -- everybody else thinks ..."? I may be a simple-minded khaki dinosaur, but you gotta admit, I have flashes of almost human insight now and then….
