Friday, June 09, 2017                                               4:19 PM

“Shooting children as they try to run to safety with their families — there are no words of condemnation strong enough for such despicable acts,” – Zeid bin Ra’ad Al Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights – from yesterday’s statement.

The above statement expresses a frequent reaction to modern life—an inability to find words suitable for the unprecedentedly uncivilized nature of certain current events. And this reaction is, more often than not, a response to the utter shamelessness of a bad actor, or actors—the disintegration of scruple among the wealthy and powerful.

The Manchester attack—at a concert known to attract little girls into tight crowds—is only one of the many terrorist ploys that beggar the belief of decent-hearted people. The animalism of war, exemplified by my opening quote, shows us war is capable, in spite of its ancient lore as a hellish experience, to become even more bestial with every passing day.

Both terrorism and war represent, at root, a failure of leadership (or a hijacking of leadership for self-indulgence). Thus, failure of leadership is a dangerous thing.

And even though America is not yet a hotbed of terrorism or war, we would be foolish to wait for such conditions before we concern ourselves with the poor quality of American leadership. The bald-faced hypocrisy and mendacity of our elected government officials, in an era when good leadership could catapult a nation to undreamed-of heights, is frustrating to the point of madness.

The stagnation of business, corruption of investment houses, the aging of infrastructure, the failure to climb aboard the express train into the future, the failure to recognize that helping the needy helps ourselves—all these things go by the boards while our media and our politicians put on a friggin tap-dance show. I’m mad as hell, and I’m…—well, you know the rest—and, if not, go watch “Network”.

So, that’s where I start from—furious that all the potential that civilization has at its disposal is virtually ignored, while we use tunnel-vision focus to get the whole nation obsessed with an issue being misrepresented on both sides. Or maybe two or three issues—to be fair, we don’t always talk about birth control or climate change.

Sometimes we all obsess over the biggest waste of national attention we’ve ever had—our president—the liar, the letch, the con-man—but our president, nevertheless. No word out of his mouth has ever educated or enlightened a single soul—never lifted a spirit or inspired a young mind—what a POS president. His greatest accomplishment, to date, is to make the Bushes seem a lot more respectable than I would have believed, if you’d asked me two years ago. I still resent Bush Jr.’s disastrous incompetence—what a mess he made—but it seems moot now, with a new Armageddon in the offing—and a far more clownish excuse for a president in office.

So, as I said—I start at furious—and then fate put Prez Puzzy-Grabba on top of the already insurmountable crowd of problems—but where do you go from furious? We’ve all run out of superlatives. What we need is a good reality competition on TV—something that airs a November marathon, to keep the Trump supporters home on election days.