Brad Walsh

What State Am I In?

The State of the Union last night was fantastic. Just as inspiring as I imagined it would be. That’s pretty much the annual pep rally that’s supposed to make us, after an hour’s worth of reflection and hype for the year to come, beam with pride and excitement about the future of America and all its ventures. Yeah, well. It came off as a kindergarten class vote on whether to keep the chinchilla or trade it to the first graders for a bag of Now & Laters. The smirks and winks that the President can’t seem to control make me sometimes wonder if an epileptic is running the country. Maybe an illiterate epileptic, judging from how many times he failed to read his cues correctly.

Everyone in that room behaved like six year olds. Six year olds who were fighting about fighting, pausing to worry about the immediately pressing issue of whether human-animal hybrids are on our horizon. Children who can’t yet shape their tongues to correctly pronounce common words. Kathy even speculated that Cheney may have been pooping his pants at one point. Hillary’s stupid little smirks certainly suggested she was passing something.

Quit booing, and standing and sitting, and hooting when the other half of the room is whinnying, and making “sour face” because you’re required to clap when you don’t want to. We’re gonna need you at at least an eighth grade level. That way you can still wax poetic in your journal about the X-men you hope are secretly being bred in activist laboratories, and you can still call your friends fags when they look at you funny, but you’ll have plenty of homework to do and you’ll get an appropriate tongue-lashing when your sister hears you listening to her phone calls from the cordless in the basement.

Tonight I went to Sarah Vowell’s reading at the Astor Barnes & Noble. I didn’t realize it until someone said it, but she was also the voice of Violet in The Incredibles. I only knew her from NPR and from the Superheroes thing I went to a few months ago with Kathy.

Kathy and I have done another podcast for JUNK. Download it here.