The CYCLOPS

I don't have television and not because I don't, sometimes, really crave a comfy night at home in front of the flickering blue lit box. I miss my "ER" and I would love to, occassionally, veg out in front of the pretty people who break up and make up and then break up and make up on "The OC". I'd like to have Jon Stewart deftly guide me through the new's of the world with humour and insight. However, I don't have the box and no overriding desire to go out and buy the box so my television viewing is severly limited. I'd like to think it's absence, generally, makes me a happier and saner person too.

However, I usually end up watching the television when I am at the gym because, god forbid, you just, you know, excersise. At my gym, Crunch, there are, at minimum, twenty televisions blaring and flickering as people run on treadmills whirling and stairmasters squeaking. The usual fare playing is, generally, MTV on one channel and CNN on another. At any time, you can look up and see "Laguna Beach" on one set and Lou Dobbs on the other reporting on "Broken Borders" and the "Disappearing Middle Class" or TRL Live on one set by a Headline News update on a soldier's death, just one more carnage filled scene of a roadside bomb in Iraq. Needless to say, it's a very, very odd mix of the frivilous and the fatal.

Last night, as I was doing my usual cardiovascular routine, feeling the "bbbuuuurrrnnn" in other words, when I looked up and caught a clip of the Cyclops, Dick Cheney, giving a one-eyed speech attacking the Democrats for questioning his rationale for going to war. He really is beginning to look more and more like that monster in Greek mythology who lived on an Island and, basically, terrorized citizens, with its rage and its one eye. It was really incredible to watch him give this speech, green bile coming out of one side of his mouth with his one squinty eye boring holes into the soul's of men. Everytime he speaks, I swear I see snakes and toads come slithering out of it but then I remember it's just the well-crafted lies that are handsomely cloaked in a rhetoric of rigtheousness and fear.

As the years pass, five to be exact since George Dubya Oedipus took office, the country seems to be living is some giant real-life, real-time version of The House of Atrius. Don't you wish someone would just hand Junior and Cyclops-Cheney a copy of a Sophocles play and tell them to read it? Their hurbris is so-over-the-top it almost seems like dramatic fiction. This Christmas lie to your children and tell them if they don't behave Dick Cheney will kill Santa and deliver coal to your door. The Cyclops would wholeheartedly approve of your manipulation; he knows sometimes you have to lie and terrorize to get children (and adults) to behave themselves.