No, please don't send in any more clowns

George W. did his state of the union (Ha!) address last week. Here’s my state of the world address.

To begin, I’ll paraphrase Shakespeare and suggest: “First we kill all the politicians.” Since the majority of politicians are lawyers, we’d end up nailing a goodly lot of them at the same time.

Not intending to begin the week on a downbeat, but it came to me after perusing the weekend papers that the world is really, really badly run these days. Actually, the world has always been really, really badly run. And since politicians have run the world since the beginning of time – oh, you might have called them caesars, or tsars, or emperors or Attila the Hun, but they were still politicians, and almost all of them botched up ultimately. Louis XVI might have died on the guillotine (deservedly), but how many others got a ‘deep’ haircut in order to get the bastard there?

In the contemporary world, in all its complexities, the ineptitude of those in power becomes vividly apparent. For example, I’ll posit the idea that George W. Bush is absolutely the worst president the US has ever experienced. Indeed, he is the worst US president the rest of the world has been forced to endure. I don’t think he’s evil, but I think he is dumb, and naïve and truly the victim of a lot of forces beyond his control, and he has never shown the strength or depth-of-character to thwart the forces of nastiness who yammer around him. And, if he is the worst, I’ll also suggest that Daddy ‘Big George’ was second worst. That’s my opinion.

But, the Democrats don’t get off the hook that easily. Bill Clinton has a following that is utterly undeserved. He may have been well-intentioned and he certainly had the acumen, intellectually and otherwise, but in following his dick rather than adroitly dealing with such evildoers as Osama when he had the chance – and he did – he paved the way for George W. If Hillary wants to stand a chance, she should rid herself of Bill’s influence on her campaign, much as she should have rid herself of Bill himself many years ago. What does it say about her that she didn’t? Just asking.

Don’t think that I, as a Canadian, would be prepared to let my own country off the hook. Canada is an utter mess and has been woefully led by the purely power motivated since the days of the despicable Pierre Trudeau. And in my own British Columbia we have a facile premier who runs around embracing an environmental agenda, including vouchsafing the idea of sticking a carbon tax on gasoline that is already taxed up the ass, but doing nothing to address an entirely hinterland that has been laid waste by the pine beetle, and has done even less to address the thousands of people sleeping rough in his cities and towns. That’s OK, he has his environmental agenda, without paying heed to the actual environment of the place. Hookers get butchered in Vancouver (which will hosting the 2010 Olympics, but all thoughts go to the Taj Mahal showplaces that will wow the visitors who aren’t prepared to look beneath the façade. This reminds me of the stories of people who used to arrive in Bombay (now Mumbai) by P&O liner and would be so impressed by the lovely white buildings along the esplanade of the harbor. The caveat was, however, don’t dare venture a block or two inland because the horrors that will greet you will stay with you for life. I know people who’ve had the experience.

This isn’t really a rant, however, it’s just an observation about the state of life as it is, who is to blame, and how the world’s only real hope is (and always has been) the good people who can sift through the morass of evil and self-seeking and do their part to try to make life more tolerable. Included in their numbers have been some politicians, but far too few.

I think at heart I’m an anarchist.