Drinks With Doug

Signs of the End Times

Monday's weather: monsoonal rains, and now just moist and cool. The plants shall thrive but I am wiped.
Monday's drink: a glass of Bella Serra Pinot Grigio. A glass and a half.
Monday's link: to the United Church of Christ, for anyone wanting to learn more about the church from a source other than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.

Sign the First: WGN-TV cancels U.S Farm report.

Was just watching a History Channel "program" about Nostradmus' super-special secret collection of lost prophecies that have only recently resurfaced. Scaaaary stuff, kiddies. Fires and plagues and hunger, all culminating in the year 2012. Just in time for the next presidential election. Coincidence? I think not.

But we don't need make-believe to scare us, and I've have been thinking about end times lately. Of both the eschatological and the far more mundane economic sorts. You couldn't have fit more bad news into the front section of yesterday's Washington Post, save for the obvious fact that there was much more that could have gone in. Globally things are getting seriously scary. And worse, we grow more unconnected with the things so necessary to life: growing food, resting, quiet, a little love.

And across the states? Fewer jobs, less money, spotty health care. More pan-handlers here in my neighborhood. More fights - and louder and more violent it sounds - outside my window on Friday and Saturday nights. Worry swirls like water in the tub, sucking more and more of us into it. And as we approach the brink (for if I lose my job, my house, my family's health-care, my children's schooling, who's to say it isn't the end of times for me?), where is our FDR?

Sign the Second: Bush Gets Laughs at WHCA Dinner

This weekend was prom here in Washington. The White House Correspondent's Association annual dinner. Of all the crappy beef-or-chicken dinners for journalists in this town - the super snotty retirement home called the Gridiron, the beer-n-brats prolitarian feel of the Radio/TV Correspondent's Association, and this one - the WHCA is usually the highest profile. This year notably. And by high profile, I mean the largest single annual migrations of ego-inflated puffins outside of the Oscars.

My friend J went to the dinner: hope she had fun. Good luck hearing what's being said at the podium...hell, at your table. The room is LOUD, the waiters just waiting to drop their 12 servings of arugula and prosciutto with port reduction right into your lap, and your table mates more interested in who's over your shoulder than what's in your head.

C and I went to one gathering - crowded, hot, people so pleased with themselves for being in each other's company. We watched the dinner on TV - the President sleep walking through his least amusing and smuggest performance ever (which is saying something.) C went to one of the afters - bizarre, wet, incompetently managed.

All boiling down to this: the New York Times is right to sit these embarrassments out. The year following the President's tragicomic slide show looking for Iraqi WMDs ("Nope, they're not under here, heh heh heh") every serious organization should have done likewise. A colleague said to me: "God, that press corps just loves this man." I disagreed. I think they're in love with the idea of their all being in that room with a President. And that is shameful.

There will be other signs in the future. Consider me your sentry at the watch-post for the apocalypse. And I think I'm learning: I should wrap up my posts before my ass starts to hurt.