I’m not one of those people that plays golf often as I find it is best enjoyed sparingly and only after adhering to a months-long regimen of intense meditation, masturbation, and dieting.  Anything less might allow for my violent competitiveness to creep in and ruin the day for everyone.  Indeed.  No one who competes against me in anything, be it darts, pool, basketball, or jacks (etc.) will end up enjoying himself very much.  If I perform well, I normally win by a large enough margin to make the game seem pointless, and if I am losing, I will fall into petulance and throw a conniption fit with little regard for the embarrassment caused by my actions. It’s a bad scene and one from which I recommend abstinence at all costs.  There is nothing like seeing a grown, half-bearded man in a straw hat and brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt stomping on the green and digging large ruts into the fairway with his 9-iron as happened today.  By the sixth hole (of nine) I was putting with a severely bent Diamondback putter that became so when I took aim at my golf bag with an old 9-wood and made what essentially proved to be my only solid contact of the day.

That was my Father’s Day gift to my dad.  How proud he must be of his 25-year-old son.

For now, it might be feasible to blame last night’s thunderstorms for flooding the course and forcing me to decide against wearing my red canvas Converse One-Stars.  Whereas the bane of my golf swing since time immemorial has been a more or less consistent and wicked slice, I kept hitting the ball off the heal of my club and putting a nasty draw on it.  Somehow, my monster drives were stolen and replaced with low-flying line drives that seemed almost magnetically attracted to the tree lines.

But it does seem shortsighted to bitch and moan about a golf game, let alone my first of the year, no matter how badly it went awry.

After all, Tehran continues to reel in the turmoil of Ahmadinejad v. Mousavi.  I have no doubt the election was fixed, but without international press allowed into Iran to report on the situation, it is difficult to know exactly what is what.  Mousavi was the former prime minister of Iran and has ties to Khomeini that are badly covered or glossed over in the Western press, facts that don’t require access to the country and should be well-publicized.  In perusing the blogosphere, I saw one comment on Anonymous Iran that went like this: “Agreed, Mousavi was more of an excuse than anything. And the spark led to a fire that is by no means about him anymore.”  So it sounds to me like Mousavi is not the reformist/outsider he was cracked up to be, and it stands to reason the the comment from Anonymous Iran might not be far from the truth.

Long before the election and the subsequent Iranian protests, the conventional wisdom stated that most Iranians did not possess the combative, ultra-conservative bent of the clinically insane Ahmadinejad.  The kids listen to Western music, wear Western clothes, and more or less, adhere to Western ideals while behind closed doors.  Sure, the view from the street was much different, but the society operated on a society-wide version of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.  Now, they’ve got a figurehead and a rallying point, and for their sake, I hope they win.  I don’t think they will, but anything that serves to dislodge or destabilize the theocratic element in their government — and, by that, I mean the Ayatollah and his clerics and, while they’re at it, Ahmadinejad — is a movement I’m likely to support.

Don’t get me wrong.  During the Bush years and before, I get the sense that the United States dealt with Iran very crassly and without nuance, and to some extent, Obama might not have sufficiently changed that tune yet.  There has been eerie but understandable silence from the White House on this matter, and any commentary that they have proffered has been tepid and unsure.  Unable to offer blunt support for the protesters, they’ve opted to criticize the Iranian government for little more than the obvious, the deaths of innocent civilians.

Until everything boils over, though, we might as well add a supportive green tint to our Twitter avatars since that’s the level at which political action operates these days.

I think that’s a damn good quote.  It’s catchy and true, and I’m friends with the man who said it.  All good reasons that it’s been stuck in my head for a week or two.

There is a sad lining to these words, though, because the truth is that neither Obama nor McCain have the slightest idea how to fix this economy.  They can debate about foreign policy all they want.  Those decisions will be made by nameless white men behind a massive smokescreen that, as far as I can tell, has been hiding this country’s policy rats since the establishment of the FBI.  And it will work the same way with the economy.

The president is and always has been an overstated role in the government.  Anyone who’s taken a high school level government class knows that much, and all the empty promises rocketing out of both candidates” mouths will fall upon barren soil.  Every.  Single.  One.  The Commander in Chief is nothing more than a glorified notary public–an executive pen wielder and patsy for those who make the real decisions.  Obama might not realize this now, still drunk on his rockstar status, though it has been significantly eroded since this crazy horseshit merry-go-round started almost two years ago, but he is going to be a shill when he takes office.  The special interests, Democratic party heavies, and a host of bitter rivals on Capitol Hill will make sure of that.  Hell. Tony Rezko might even make a few calls from his prison cell (READ: Caribbean resort) just to make sure all is going according to plan.

And it will be.

Sure.  He doesn’t know the first thing about the economy.  Neither does John McCain.  But with all the pitfalls that stand in the way of his [Obama's] success, there isn’t a whole lot to worry about, especially not since the Dow’s staggering losses just before the markets closed today.  The stock market has lost almost 40% of its value in one year, and most of us, I think, should feel that we’re closing in on the bottom.  It can’t get much worse.  The only things left to lose are our jobs.

Perhaps I’m overstating the severity of the situation, but I can’t help feeling that this is the necessary medicine for years of adherence to free market capitalism, which really means very simply that a lack of oversight and general ignorance on the part of everyday Americans will allow moneymen and executives on Wall Street to plunder the piggy bank on a national scale and bring about a dangerous, destabilizing misappropriation of wealth.  Trickle down economics has failed.  Once and for all.  Let us never consider it again.

What really and truly confuses me, though, is what people hear from Barack Obama that sounds much different from the rest of the politicians.  His policies certainly weren’t much different from Hillary Clinton’s, and anyone who watched even one of those lame, free-for-all Democratic primary debates knows that Obama edged her out solely on the basis of likability.  But seriously.  I wouldn’t be railing on Obama if he hadn’t sold himself as the New Hope, the man with spare Change in his pocket.  He could have either surprised me by following through on his word, or he could have spared me the letdown.  Then again, I was foolish to have the small modicum of hope that I did when this whole thing started out.

In the last month, I’ve heard negative campaigning, political attack ads, and numerous vagaries meant to parry inconvenient lines of questioning.  I’ve heard it from both candidates, and the election is now as mundane as any I’ve seen.  Same.  Old.  Shit.

And it makes me wonder—yes, we’re coming upon my hidden gist here–why people are so reticent to support a third-party or independent candidate.  There is the argument that you’re throwing a vote away, right into the river or Lake Michigan if you’re from Chicago.  What if, though, people voted for the candidate they truly wanted—the one that hits all the right points and tickles all those fuzzy places inside, whatever they may be and whichever way they might lean.  You’d have at least four major candidates, and truth is the only reason we don’t is that the whole “throwing your vote away” hogwash re-instills the impossibility.

It works just like our current economic crisis.  People panic, and they’re afraid.  They sell their stocks and make a bad situation worse.  Except this time, we’re not selling our stocks.  We’re selling off (cheaply) our free will and our power to make our own decisions.  We’ve let ourselves be pigeonholed into the D’s and R’s that appear next to our politicians’ names, and we are paying for it every single day.

That’s why the Iraq War happened.  It’s why the stock market crashed today.  It’s why we feel helpless and complain that our voices are not heard in our state and national capitals.  It’s because we don’t hold anyone accountable for what they do.  We just bitch and moan while they do it, and the biggest change most of us ever think to make is switching from D to R or vice versa as if it would do any good.