Cleaning out the desk...

PART I: THAT RASCALLY YABBUT

My mind wanders. Sometimes I look up and find it in the damnedest places. While my body's taking the bus into work, my brain's sending up an endless litany of questions, trying to answer itself, and tying itself in knots.
Why is this bus just sitting here for five or six minutes? (To get back on schedule, doofus). Yeah, but why is it idling? Isn't the whole point of public transit supposed to be saving the environment? (Uh...)
Oh, we're moving again. Why won't people on a packed bus ever move back beyond the back door without repeated demands from the driver? (They don't want to have to wrestle their way to the exit.) Yeah, but the back of the bus is so much closer to the back door than the middle of it. (Umm...)
We're coming up to the end of the line, the last stop, where everybody gets out. Somebody rings the bell. WHY? (To let the driver know they want the bus to s--) Yeah, but it has to stop here. It always stops here, without fail. (Hmmm)...
And so on and so forth. People look over at me and see a geeky guy with glasses, head buried in a book, and they have no idea my brain is boiling. I look over at the half-naked chick in the peak of health sitting in the seat reserved for elderly or handicapped people and I just want to shout "WHY?! Are you intentionally rude or just lazy?" Then I wonder why it is that with one short glance at someone, I can guess--with about ninety percent accuracy--whether they're going to make a beeline for the very back of the bus. In each case, I wonder if they know "the back of the bus" is historically where all the second class citizens have sat, and why they would want to put themselves in that category.
In this way I can pass an entire hour of commuting time without once looking outside the bus. Sure, my blood pressure's sky high by the time I get off, but hey, that's just to counteract the synthetic "air" they pump into those damn things. (What do bus manufacturers have against windows that can open?)

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PART II: THE WORLD'S NOT GOING TO HELL...

...it's already well into Hell's suburbs. Proof, as if anyone really needs it, can be found on the list of most popular Web searches and sites for 2006. The most popular non-search-engine was Myspace.com, that site where friendless people claim thousands of friends, where people build up entire online lives to convince themselves they have lives. The most popular "news" search term was "Paris Hilton", who (a) has nothing to do with anything even remotely important and who never will; and (b) whose 'charms' are so ubiquitous, in every medium imaginable, it's hard to see why anyone would ever feel the need to search them out; and (c) will only be "news" when she says or does something intelligent.
Most popular question: "who is Borat"? I'm so far from au courant I can hardly be said to be on the beach, and even I can tell you he's some actor named Cohen. And I didn't even have to look that up. What I want to know is, who cares?

It bothers me to no end that people--especially young people, who are supposed to represent our future--are increasingly abandoning Real Life in droves to immerse themselves in virtual realities. They're 'screening out'. I could understand it, I suppose, if it was an escape from the horrors of the real world, but it's not...many people live their lives blissfully unaware of any ongoing dramas in which they do not play a starring role. To me, this is even scarier than accelerating climate change, militant Islam, or any of the other issues we're dealing with: the apathy, ego, and misplaced priorities, in the end, will kill us all.

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PART III: SADDAM HANGS

Saddam's name means 'one who confronts'. Rarely was any child so aptly named. Hussein confronted his last foe in a Baghdad dawn and went down swinging. Now the rest of us need to confront what we have wrought.
There is little doubt by any standard the man was a Prime Asshole. Anybody who could conceive of feeding an enemy into a giant paper shredder (if you were merely disliked, you went in head first...if you were outright hated, you went in the other way), much less repeatedly carry that out, well, it goes without saying we're better off now that he's dead.
But there still remain Sunnis fanatically loyal to him and his cause, and the sectarian violence gripping Iraq will only increase and perhaps spill over into neighbouring Middle East states. At least with Hussein alive and in power, you had certainties. They were brutal certainties, to be sure. But as one man quoted in today's Globe and Mail noted, "When Saddam was here, you knew who his people were and you avoided them. Now you never know who is who."
It should be noted that Saddam Hussein was a steadfast ally of the United States when he was committing the crimes for which he was hanged. That it took a geopolitical shift for America to care is simply unconscionable. The supreme irony in all this is that it will take another man of Hussein's proclivities to have any hope of keeping Iraq in check.