By Rick Kerger
SPECIAL TO TOLEDO FREE PRESS
Ford looked angrily at him.
“Will you listen?” he snapped.
“I’ve been listening,” said Arthur, “but I am not sure it’s helping.”
Yes, I have been rereading Douglas Adams’ treatise, “Theb More Than Complete Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Universe.” More than 30 years ago, this tome made its way into the world and while it is only slightly less difficult to follow than the Book of Revelation, it is a great deal funnier. I bring this up because modern circumstances make me feel a little like Arthur Dent, the protagonist of Adams’ works.
Shooting across the galaxy in an in-credibly large spacecraft with a two-headed friend and a depressed robot, then having to put up with an even larger spacecraft filled with comatose telephone sanitizers and hairdressers, coupled with watching his planet (that is to say our planet) blown up, Arthur is a bit puzzled. So am I these days.
Some of the puzzling things are good, but still inexplicable. For example, when John Kennedy ran for president, there was a near-constant attack to the effect that if he were elected, the pope would run the United States. That was because of his religion— he was a Catholic. Mitt Romney is an active and sincere Mormon, a Christian religion of fairly recent vintage that is far less mainstream than Catholicism. Yet his religion in no way became even a side issue in the recent election.
Now perhaps there were closets full of people voting for Obama and against Romney because of Mitt’s Mormonism, but that seems pretty unlikely.
So why this complete shift in attitude in just 50 years? Why an outbreak of tolerance in regard to religion? Is it because Democrats are more tolerant? Or maybe the Broadway play about the Mormons humanized them and Mitt?
Then I read about a group of Texans that wants to have their home state secede from the union. What is ironic is that the odds-on favorite movie to win the Best Picture Oscar this year is “Lincoln,” a film about how a president becomes a giant historical figure by defeating the South’s effort to secede! Perhaps they do not show the film in Texas, but if I were heading down the avenue some of them apparently are, it is a film worth watching.Dallas might wind up looking like Atlanta after Gen. Sherman’s saunter through Georgia.
Then there is the “fiscal cliff.” Apparently the United States Congress and the president are going to join hands and run over a cliff like lemmings because of inaction. Criticism could be leveled that the cliff is not high enough and certainly not soon enough to have avoided the insanity of the last election, but we talk about its consequences as being the economic equivalent of the Bubonic plague! From my reading, it is more like a fiscal speed bump than a cliff.
All of this has combined to create a miasma that leaves me as confused as Arthur Dent — I am listening but it is not helping.
Where is Zaphod Beeblebrox when we need him?
