We Won’t Get What Again?, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #318 | @MDWorld

March 18, 2013 Mike Gold 19 Comments

I enjoy long distance driving. Outside of the occasional moment of sheer panic (which are few once west of New Jersey), I find it relaxing. And while my mind is on my driving, I do entertain the ambient thought or twelve. As I have driven almost 2,000 miles since I last invaded your attention, I’ve got a few scenes to share.

Hugo Chavez died, and from the reaction on the teevee you’d think it was V-J Day. Asked why they didn’t like him, the average American-on-the-street said he called President Bush names. What did he call him? Chavez called him a donkey, a drunk, a coward, and the devil.

When it comes to name-calling, Hugo was a pantywaist. I’ve called Bush a lot worse in this very space. Many Americans still refer to him in terms that would curdle milk. Freedom of speech isn’t solely the right of Americans; either we believe in it for all or we don’t believe in it at all. And let’s face it, given our track record you can hardly blame a leftist South American leader for being a little bit concerned about forced removal from office by the CIA… one way or the other.

Speaking about free speech, while driving through Ohio on I-80 I saw a billboard featuring a cartoonish painting of a hideously grinning Barack Obama – I surmise somebody thought better and airbrushed out the big lips – with the legend “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Well, that’s protected speech all right, but I doubt Chavez paid for it. My guess is that a good old American put it up. Maybe Pat Boone, who outed Obama as a Marxist on Fox last week.

And speaking about Pete Townshend (I’m great at segues), I think it is safe to say his most famous couplet was from that very same song. It went “Meet your new boss. Same as the old boss.” This brings me to the subject of Pope Francis I.

If you think I’m going to go off on a scree against the old man, I might disappoint you. My scree is limited to the oft-heard phrase “Today everybody’s Catholic,” which I’ll let go without comment. Well, that and overkill. The “all pope, all the time” shtick was annoying. CNN had a SmokeCam insert on the screen so that each time the temporary stack belched up its smoke, it would be up there live for all to see. Really? You mean, if they made a decision they wouldn’t break in on their wall-to-wall Jodi Arias coverage?

So the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was greeted as a breath of fresh air of tsunami proportions. Being the first Latin pope doesn’t make you a reformer and it doesn’t mean millennia of policy will now be reversed. Francis doesn’t have a very good track record on the subject. He was silent, if not outright supportive, during the 1976 CIA supported right-wing coup d’état that overthrew Isabel Perón. As one might expect, he worked against the movement to legalize abortion in the cases of rape and incest. And, again, as one might expect, he got completely bent out of shape when President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner promoted a vote to legalize same-sex marriage. After her efforts were supported by a majority of the Argentinian voters, Cardinal Bergoglio deemed President Kirchner to be persona non grata and relationships between the Catholic church and the government effectively came to an end.

That’s the way dogma goes. They believe what they believe – amusingly, we hold Muslims in contempt for that – and they aren’t happy to change. If you’re a priest and you’re thinking about getting married, if you’re a woman and you’re thinking about becoming a priest, those cardinals just blew white smoke up your ass.

Meet your new boss. Same as the old boss.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.