It's a neighborly day in this beautywood

A Chinese-Wood (Is It Not Good?), Chung-in-teak 2012.6 update to my 2005.10 essay for the NPR feature This I Believe, under the new working title This I Be Leavin' As Fast As My Fat Legs Will Outboard-Propel Me Across The Atlantic (If Not Harper's) To Denmark Or Iceland Or Along The Pacific To Australia Or Any Other North European/South Pacific Countries With Hot Heads - If Not Quite Hotheads - Of Government.

DSL. in ten years - or ten minutes

We the humor bloggers of the Year 2012 have so many topics within the sphere of gut-wrenching social pathology alone from which to choose for future posts that we may be said to be embarrassé unto beet redness, and in two languages, already, in beholding our own boundlessly satire-ripe richesses within the feather-worthy plain of our otherwise excruciating raw material:

Should we devote our next essay in the tickling of the ribs to the industrial scale of the interspecies cruelties, reckless use of the land and shameless corporate manipulation with which our every bite and our every sip - not least when hatched by the morally self-fellating marketers of the "green" and the "organic"* - are marbled?

*As of today, Ben and Jerry's, Kashi and Stonyfield have my permission to kneel before me, seek, with my permission, my fly, and cut me their checks in the resulting gratitude of their sinners' temporary absolution from 8 to 5 weekdays and from 8 to noon Saturdays

Should we dedicate a future post in light-operatic drollery to the mass murder, garbed in vestments by turns Jacksonian and humanitarian, by which our foreign policy enacts its plutocrat imperatives?

Should we take a smirking peek at that largest in scale of ensemble sitcoms waiting to draft itself from out of that slow murder-by-numbers of both souls and bodies we like to call our criminal "justice" and prison systems? For what could possibly stand as a greater validation of that most sacred among myths by which we live and die and, not least, kill, that of American exceptionalism, than an incarceration rate far and away highest among all (technically, if not in morals) developed nations, feeding the blood-trickling maw of that blackest among ever-ravening Molochs driving us at white-knuckle speed into banana-Republican territory, our prison-industrial complex? We must be doing something Right! URP! Say - pass your Uncle Sam in the driver's seat that G-d-damned-Dad-burned motherfucking Octuple Arse-Whooper With Bull-Sperm Cheese and Whale Oil Dressing he just handed you in the bag from the ram-thru window of the truckle-stop Burglar Queen off the last Final Exit, will ya? And whatever you do, don't ask Him so G-vernment-dam (e.g., Hoover) many questions - he's trying to keep what's left of his good electric eye on the road the better to rev the nation's sixty-seat, twelve-lane, 180-wheel SUV from O to Over A Canyon Tumbling End Over End To Slow-Motion Fireball Finish in under 5.0 hybrid tanks of Premium Unleaded and free-range bacon grease! You're doin' a heckuva job, Red, White and Baba Blooey, of giving every last lifer among us, on either side of the wall, a life to die for and - urp! - from, starting in the nip-noshing, milk-juggling cradle and ending, in final white-powdered and still calcium-rich form, in the non-dairy crematorium.

Should we professional laugh-chasers, we teasers of the nation's bushy armpits on either side of our fascist divide, attempt with tinkling pianist grace to decide whether the American left deserves first casting into G-d's volcano from marginally slight moral desert over its well-matched wingnut opposite number, or merely, in the likely event of a draw, from that most pious among moral precepts of all - Business Before Pleasure?

Should we assay the failure of both the Civil Rights "revolution" and the anodyne corporate good cheer of our inflight-magazine/CNN/USA Weekend culture to, 149 years after Emancipation, assuage our festering, murderous racial agonies?

Or should the more macro-economist of satirists within our blessed guild sink their shafts in an attempt to mine the total capture of our politics, economy and culture alike by faceless global conglomerates and the soulless billionaires who love and are loved by them?

Or - hey, kids, what say we put on a real show! -  should we draw a smiling cannonball bead instead upon the real roots of our serially-societal compostings of the psyche that lie deep within that world's tiniest of totalitarian dictatorships, the patriarchal family, the very - sniff! - Backbone of - sob! - "Christian" Society? Then, as heads red and roaring sick in helpless mirth commence to roll along every aisle, we'll really bring down the house in asking not why the proportion of murders committed within families is so markedly high - but why in bloody hell on earth is it not ten freakin' times that height? How about it, science?

So many giant Chesapeake crabs just hurling themselves unbidden into our little boats, so many land-of-Cockaigne roast pigeons glazed in truffle whizzing into the hangars of our every open, shiny and grease-trickling lip!

Anybody says we don't, as of Publish Post time, suckle hourly upon the very juggular bosom of a Land of Opportunity gets a free lunch at my place - my knuckle sandwich is to cry for in laughing over every bloody fucking bite.