sometimes its those small connections that mean the most

Walt Whitman

I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;

I see that the word of my city is that word up there,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, with tall and wonderful spires,
Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships—an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets—high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies;

Tide swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d;

The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business—the houses of business of the ship-merchants, and money-brokers—the river-streets;

Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week;

The carts hauling goods—the manly race of drivers of horses—the brown-faced sailors;

The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft;

The winter snows, the sleigh-bells—the broken ice in the river, passing along, up or down, with the flood tide or ebb-tide;

The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes;

Trottoirs throng’d—vehicles—Broadway—the women—the shops and shows,
The parades, processions, bugles playing, flags flying, drums beating;

A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men;

The free city! no slaves! no owners of slaves!
The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!
The city nested in bays! my city!
The city of such women, I am mad to be with them! I will return after death to be with them!
The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them!

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a.k.a. The Republicans
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/0...
A guy walks into a talent agent's office and says "Have I got an act for you!"

The agent asks "Yeah? What sort of act?" and the guy says,

"It's a political act. There's me, my running mate, our aides and media chums and their aides, plus a few non-union extras who work for less than minimum wage.

"First I walk on stage with a baby seal. I start feeding the baby seal endangered fish that I pull from a 55-gallon drum labeled 'Clean Water.' The fish have been soaking in mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls and crude oil. While the baby seal oinks and pukes and turns green, my running mate starts clubbing it with a 6-foot crucifix. Our media chums narrate this whole thing, explaining how we're making the environment safer for fish and baby seals. Then my running mate starts stuffing illegal campaign contributions into the seal's body cavity while slicing off layers of fat and passing the fat to the audience, while our aides pass out press releases explaining that the baby seal fat is actually safer than it was before I fed it mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls.

"Next, one of the non-union extras drives a huge HumVee onto the stage. We've modified it so it gets half a mile per gallon. It's belching out carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons like crazy. We've sealed all the ventilation ducts so the audience gets the full dose. This makes them light-headed, and more likely to find this entertaining. The HumVee has a banner on the side that says 'Blue Skies.' We start singing Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World,' in black-face and pickaninny voices. Al Jolson would be proud of this part.

"We truck in a bunch of crippled kids and tell them how compassionate we are, but then we rip up their Medicare checks, dump them out of their wheel chairs and order them off stage. They drag their disfigured bodies from the stage while we call them a drain on society and we sell their wheel chairs to GM for scrap metal.

"While this is going on, one of our media chums is having phone sex with his aide, describing unspeakable acts involving a falafel and a loofah, and he's masturbating the whole time. We patch into the call using an illegal wiretap and broadcast it over the PA system in the theater, and blame the mainstream liberal press for the repulsive content.

"A guy dressed as Jesus walks onstage and kicks a guy dressed as Mohammed in the crotch. Jesus tells the audience that they need to give all their money to him or go to Hell. Then Jesus picks up the crucifix we used to club the baby seal, and attaches strings to it. The strings are connected to the hands and feet of a woman in a persistent vegetative state. Jesus makes her dance around the stage like a marionette, and preaches about the Kingdom of Heaven.

"After that, Rush Limbaugh comes on stage and bloviates about the sanctity of marriage, the importance of personal responsibility, and how drug users should be locked up in prison. As he's delivering this monologue, we trot out an underage girl my running mate has knocked up the day before. We dangle a morning-after pill just out of her reach and lecture her on sexual abstinence. All her jumping up and down causes her to spontaneously abort her 1-day-old embryo.

"We carve Ronald Reagan's face onto a life-sized mock-up of the Statue of Liberty.

"Meanwhile, one of my aides is cleaning an assault rifle, which accidentally goes off and blows the head off a lady in the front row. He then gives a long-winded lecture on the 2nd Amendment, and again, personal responsibility.

"On a giant screen at the back of the stage, we play an endless loop of news coverage of a privileged white girl who went missing in Aruba.

"While this is going on, I start firing missiles at the studio next door, saying that the act over there is against family values and God, and they have weapons of mass destruction aimed at our studio. Then I do a pantomime of looking for the WMD under sofas and behind the curtains, laughing my ass off. I never find the WMD, but I keep insisting that the other studio was a dire threat to our studio.

"I explain how morally superior we are, and how we're the only ones who really understand personal responsibility and Christian values and abstinence and the sanctity of marriage and the evils of drug abuse.

"We all dance and slide around in the baby seal blood and fat and the dead lady's blood, and the PCBs and oil and the tears from the underage pregnant girl (Did I mention that she's homeless? She's homeless.). We're rubbing the blood and oil all over each other, slapping each other on the backs, congratulating ourselves on a job well done, and laughing at the homeless pregnant girl and waterboarding the guy dressed as Mohammed as he issues a fatwah against us and the entire audience.

"Then for the finale, we all join in a rousing chorus of 'Nearer My God To Thee.'

"Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that the audience will walk out in droves and demand refunds. But that's the beauty. My running mate and I have cooked the books so that even after you hand out all the refunds, you still made more money than they originally paid. The audience has to pay for their tickets with their credit cards. We steal the credit card numbers and max them out to pay for the lavish party we throw after the show. Halliburton does the catering, so it costs about twice what it should.

"Now get this: We tape the whole show and broadcast it on Fox. Nobody watches it, but we paid Diebold to make the ratings-counters, so it will have the highest ratings in television history."

The agent says "Wow. That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?"

And the guy says "The Republicans!"

major props to The•Walrus from BuzzFlash

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