Happy Days are Here Again!

"Happy Days are Here Again!" That used to be the U.S. Democratic Party's song. The last time I remember hearing it was in 1968, when at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a brass band tried to drown out boos from delegates as the Party machinery forced the presidential nomination of Lyndon Johnson's pathetic, spineless tool Hubert Humphrey. That summer an assassin's bullet and the leaders of the Democratic Party gave the world Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and six more years of the vicious, deadly U.S. war against Vietnam.

These days things are at least as bad as they were in 1968, in the U.S. Two illegal and immoral wars going, and a third now underway (by drone) in Pakistan. A concentration camp at Guantanamo, still, and everybody trying to forget about U.S. war crimes and torture. No right of Habeas Corpus, still--suspended by George Bush's presidental proclamation, and still suspended by Barack Obama. Will it ever be restored? Or does the U.S. find it more convenient to be able to "disappear" people?

But I am told I should be happy, even if my country is a rogue state.

I should be happy, even though New Orleans is still--five years after Katrina--trying to house its homeless. Even though poverty in the United States is unrelieved. Even though our schools are for the most part a disaster. Even though our expensive new health care bill will leave millions of Americans without access to medical care. And the rich are still rich, and getting richer. And the rich are still rich, and getting richer. And the rich are still rich, and getting richer.

Should I say that again? And the rich are still rich, and getting richer.

But never mind them. If the rest of us were decent, we could give the rich away--to Antarctica--and take care of our problems without them. We could, if we had proper, decent leadership. But without having taken care of our poor, our homeless, our ill-educated, our uninsured, even without quitting the wars that bankrupt us both economically and morally, even without closing our concentration camp at Guantanamo, President Obama is talking about wanting to send men to Mars! For that, he should win the Marie Antoinette Prize--or be sent to mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein to live out his idiocy.

That's a joke, of course. Not a very good one, not enough of one to get me a place in the chorus of Americans singing "Happy Days are Here Again." But even if I sang "Happy Days are Here Again," I couldn't make myself deaf to the chorus of our wrongs and the sad, shameful state we are in.