Blunderers all

This trip Hertz gave me a Mazda 3. This is a weird car that has a dual personality – functioning either as an automatic or a stick shift. I’m sorry, but people who can’t decide whether they want automatic or stick shift in the comfort of their living rooms shouldn’t be allowed to make split-second potentially life-threatening decisions on the road. If the automotive engineers wanted to come up with something really useful, they’d invent a transmission that changed gears at random, for people who can’t decide what gear they ought to be in. This is how most people seem to drive anyway, so they’d be catering for a larger market segment.

Anyway, enough of all that …

Bush, Longhorns and Columbus: blunderers all.

Last night I watched the second presidential debate between George Dubya and John Kerry. I honestly don’t know who to believe. “Spin” has become such a way of life for these people that I think they’ve really convinced themselves they’re being truthful. The audience dutifully asked their questions, and then sat looking thoroughly bored as the same old answers (and evasions of answers) rolled glibly from the politicians’ mouths. At least a two-party system has advantages: the nation is so polarized that whoever gets in (and sadly, I think it will be Bush again), the gridlock will be sufficient to prevent either side from doing anything. In England, the also-rans will steal so many votes from the only party that could provide an effective opposition that Tony Blair will once again be handed carte blanche to pursue his misguided policies. The fact remains that George W. Bush committed one of the biggest blunders of modern history by invading Iraq.

Today is the “Red River Shootout” – Oklahoma University (OU, or the Sooners) are playing the University of Texas (UT, or the Longhorns) at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. This is an annual, highly-charged college football game that OU have won for the last four years. The Red River, by the way, is the river that separates Texas and Oklahoma. Watching the Longhorns blunder about on the field, they did well to lose by only 12 points to 0.

And Monday is Columbus Day. According to the book that Lucy gave me (“1421 – The Year China Discovered the World”, by Gavin Menzies), Columbus’ blundering voyages around the world were probably not quite so heroic as was previously supposed. Far from venturing into the unknown, fearful of sailing off the edge of the world, he was following maps produced decades earlier by the Chinese. And “discovering” lands that he well knew had been discovered before.

Blunderers. A coincidence? I don’t think so.

Life is too important to take seriously. Seriously.