The Politics of Saturday Night.

Have you ever wondered why the news always tells you horror stories? Have you ever wondered why there seems to be more school shootings, random snipers, and general mayhem? Why, if I was to take the news at face value, I’d assume that everyone in The City would be dead already.

It’s fairly obvious, of course. Bad News sells stories.

But the thing to remember, of course, is that the media lies. I don’t mean that the horrible things they tell you about don’t happen, it’s just that that’s all they tell you about.

If that weren’t the case, then explain why just last night I had a very enjoyable evening out in sleazy taverns with my wife, along with Coffee Bean and his wife(?)? The fact is, and the one thing the media (and, not-so-coincidentally, the “government”) don’t want you to think about is this: things just aren’t that bad.

I’ve always liked bars. True, they are horrible places that are in the business of catering to social ills and liver disease, but they are also honest places. People may come in acting like someone else, but after 3 hours of drinking, The Truth becomes apparent. In fact, I assert that it really isn’t possible to actually know someone until you’ve seen them half in the bag.

This is, obviously, one of the reasons I don’t drink. Besides, I had enough fun watching the other three getting messed up and threatening insurance salesmen. The salesmen had it coming, and I have long since learned not to interfere when my wife goes nuts. Hell, she beat up the midget at our wedding. Horrible, horrible. To this day, she still refers to midgets as “human hacky sacks”. In the end, no salesmen were harmed (with the slight exception of an educational fist in the kidneys of the loud one), and we shortly afterward went out to breakfast (the cool 2:30AM kind).

And if it’s possible to have that kind of fun on a Saturday night, then just maybe things aren’t all that bad, are they? There is a term that I have lifted from an old Mel Gibson movie, Air America...”The politics of Saturday night”. You can gauge the health of a culture by how much fun everyone has on Saturday night.

Just think about it for a moment...Saudi Arabia probably has a lousy Saturday night. Hell, in 1890s America, Saturday night consisted of the working man falling into an exhausted coma following 6 twelve hour days at the widget factory, for less pay than it took to keep him alive (“I owe my soul to the company store”, etc). Doesn’t sound healthy, does it? And that implies that things have actually gotten better with time, doesn’t it?

And this is part of what fuels my rage with the monkeys that I share a country with. The end result of all the crappy legislation and flirtations with totalitarianism that our nation has been indulging in is the death of Saturday night, should we be so foolish to allow things to go that far.

The good news is that while Americans tend to get all worked up over things (Jesus, Terrorism, communists, etc), they always eventually get tired of being puritanical or terrified, and then they want to go out and have fun. The bad news is, after having fun for a while, they have kids...and then they become terrified of fun, and try their best to put a stop to it. And the best way to stop fun, of course, is to spread fear. The media also does this, but they do it so that you’ll be too afraid to go out, and you’ll stay home in front of their programming.

Well, let them try. I, for one, plan to have fun and to keep having fun, and I will run over anyone that gets in my way, probably without noticing it. So let this be a warning to the current crop of the No Fun crowd out there...You do what you want, and you let me do what I want, or you’re likely to have big engineer boot prints all over your chest.

Nothing personal.

Or kill me.