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Pomp and Circumstance



Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
-Shakespeare Othello


Through it all, I guess we all crave some sort of regiment. Some sort of safety and order… something to fall back on when we have no idea what to do. We busy ourselves with niceties and codes of conduct and rules and regulations and a thousand other self inflicted keepers. The world needs some kind of order, right? Without them there would be chaos, right?

My hand shakes even now, as I shrug off the last droplets of alcohol’s sweet embrace. The long summer days and careless, lazy evenings of July and August can bring you back to places you never knew you left. Like warm, wet whiskey on a Sunday afternoon, sometimes there can be comfort in the familiar.

I can’t help but laugh to myself as I write these words. Sometimes all it takes is to feel the warmth of the sun or a cool breeze pulsing through the air, to put a man in a reflective mood. New perspectives can be found around every corner and a new outlook on it all can open your eyes to many things.

We need our facades. We need our values and morality projected unto us. The herd mentality is to stay within the herd. These things are so clichéd now and so overdone and so over-examined, and yet they still ring true in many ways. As our leaders keep feeding us spoonful after spoonful of bullshit, we can do nothing but ask for more.

The American Spirit is a volatile mixture of pioneer spirit, distaste for pretension and a mean whiskey drunk. The waters of popular opinion are starting to reach the high water mark and the dams built from the lies and whore-mongering of our current group of money-grubbing “leaders” are about to come crashing down. The wagons are circled and the lynch mob has arrived. As hard as it is to believe now, NO ONE stays on top forever.

Downing Street, Valerie Plame, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, Enron, Halliburton… these are the names and phrases that will be associated with the downfall of the Bush administration, one of the most arrogant, selfish and corrupt administrations in the history of the United States.

When everything comes crumbling down I’ll be sitting at my bar laughing into the night, a tall glass of warm bourbon in one hand and a bible in the other… praying that the next batch of bastards isn’t worse.


Jonny O
July 11th, 2005