Thinking of The Children

So the photo below has been making the rounds as far as saying "oh isn't that sweet and how could anyone thing bad of him" because Kundera-esque kitsch knows no bounds on both sides, and visuals are powerful mediums. The camera only shows one angle, one dimension and any picture can be worth a thousand words of propaganda. Besides, part of Politics 101 is kissing babies and posing with kids. Who the hell are we kidding?
 

 let's take a look at the rest of the world, shall we? Here's Enver Hoxha, Der Fuhrer, Lenin, Richard Nixon, Josef Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Everybody's Not-Favorite Pope, Mr. KGB, and Robert Mugabe. Oh it's so sweet. Who would ever think that any of these people did anything that wasn't nice and didn't Care A Lot?

and of course this:

It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it, right Chuck?...

speak to me of universal greed

I met the Queen of the Bondo downtown after work yesterday, where we got Jamaican meat pies and hung out in Tower City watching the last minute preparations and picking out the future gamblers of Clevelandia from the level above the food court, mostly super dressed up senior citizens and suburban crackers in chinos and such. You could pick them out from the working stiffs and The Kids pretty easily because in part they looked like they haven't come downtown in decades. The people who owned the stores in the mall looked universally anxious and stressed out, as did the casino peons, because this is all new and who knows what kind of pressure there is further up the food chain. And there were lots of cops everywhere, and the SWAT team because you know things might get real if too many of The Bus People go crazy and because my paranoid self sees the barricades and big guns that seem to multiply every year as dystopian dress rehearsal.

Everything kind of had that tacky look of ersatz swank that impresses the yokels but isn't terribly special, and the other outgrowths of the casino/convention economy are already making themselves evident too. We were waiting to cross the street to catch our bus back to the west side and there was a trio of lithe Somali girls chainsmoking cigarettes outside the hotel in short shorts and colorful leggings that looked kind of lost before hopping on the trolley that goes to another hotel and the whole sight gave me the shivers, because I know this is going to be happening a lot and it isn't always going to be so out in the open, and because Somali girls have been victims of trafficking in this area before and now with the casino, it will probably be moreso.

It was hard to be snarky eventually, because the human cost will be so high, of broken families and desperate people and exploited girls. There might be some revenue that goes back to the city, but I really don't give a damn about the convention industry and the what happens in said city stays in said city mentality. We're already screwed financially by the system, but do we have to be screwed in every other way too? All of this supposed economic panacea comes at a price far more than its perceived monetary worth, and it just makes me mad. I called one of my friends who works with refugee populations to see if she can get something going, because I don't know what else to do except to watch and then attempt to take some kind of action, because I can't just let this go.

pssst...!

So in the class I'm taking, we had a quiz today, with some stupid questions, but ten points, multiple choice, scantron, not too hard right? Anyways, We The Peonage have been feeling teleported back to 8th grade social studies between the know-it-allness of one of the profs and the antics of our not-so-peers, who spend most of their time flirting, texting, affixing sticky notes with I HEART MILFS on each others' backs, and can't find Saudi Arabia on a map.

You know the answers don't you?

Maybe.

Why won't you share the answers with me?

No.

A few minutes pass.

It's nice to share, why aren't you being nice?

While I could have had a chance to Derkins him with a little more mental preparation, I was a bit stunned to see the blatant cheating going on, not even the surreptitious kind, but blatant copying of answers. I am not much fun, but I feel downright prissy at this point, and a little amazed, and also knowing that these our the future leaders of our world and that this more or less has always been the future leaders of the world, because getting ahead is not so much by hard work as it is by connections and manipulation and letting others do the work for you.