Last week on vacation I started feeling good about America again. Vacations can be that way. Nice places and people having fun can even make Scrooge optimistic. But they also give the mind time to slow down, cast aside endless rumination about the next task, and lead to some semi-coherent thinking…..

While I was planting corn on the north 40, getting shredded by carnivorous chiggers and burned by the sun (unfettered by the neglected ozone layer, according to Al “eco”-Gore), our troops were taking out Al-Qaeda’s number two thug, the right’s most prolific hit woman was scolded by her own for going beyond the pail, and Iraq’s pupal government took wing like a Monarch emerging from its cocoon. What message and meaning was I to divine from these seemingly unrelated events? I struggled to put it together, and why I didn’t just pop another Budweiser escapes me now as then, but watching the birds and bees do heterosexual bird and bee things brought it to home – after I heard the Senate defeated the pro-traditional marriage constitutional amendment.

Bill Frist’s shot around the world was a metaphorical dud. For red meat conservatives, wasting time on this dead-on-arrival cultural issue evokes fightin’ words. And they know that the pols will continue to push their agenda---getting reelected. Yet with these these overzealous attempts to win our hearts (and ballots), they unknowingly thwart the very support they seek. So it came to me as I realized that 99.9% of the animals on the ranch act heterosexually, and are appropriately more concerned about survival and nurturing their families than extinguishing the few individuals that harbor aberrant sexual behaviors.

Whether you think about the polarized American body politic, or our current undervalued position in the World, we’ve bigger fish to fry than flag burning or marital demographics, folks. Since shortly after ousting Saddam Hussein, we have been a bitterly divided, sometimes downright mean spirited People. It’s as though, in political terms, the extreme flanks of each party have ceded from the Union. Politicians from both sides and their shills in the press pander to those who are addicted to cultural sensationalism. Meanwhile, they fritter away time designated for substantive debate and the opportunity to govern for the sake of the United States of America. Frist legislatively pushes iconic imagery in the run up to November and beyond. Yet there are 18 judicial seats empty and 3 stalwart conservative judges whose votes Frist will not insist on. Dean, Pelosi and Reid focus on the mirage of a Rove indictment and Murtha calls the same troops who nailed al-Zarqawi cold blooded murderers. But they defeated true Social Security reform and will not budge on tax overhaul. 

Me bitter? Disillusioned? No, just thankful as a turtle who just ducked the car’s front tire that we little folks, the ones who toil to pay the players their taxes so they can perpetuate their power trips, still live real lives. We know that just to spite the good folks in D.C., the good Lord will continue to see that the sun rises with azure glory, that birds and bees will delight us with Technicolor plumage and golden honey, and that we’ll keep living out our quiet lives loving time with family and friends over good food and fermented crops of one sort or another.