Always on top

We all want the same things: a slightly bigger apartment, a nicer couch, financial security, a flat screen, fame, fortune and a constantly diverted mind. The pursuit of this last one can prove tricky this time of year. It seems odd. We should all be out buying Nintendo Wiis and predistressed jeans and crock pots for all our dearest loved ones. Or we should be helping orphans and old curmudgeons discover the true meaning of Christmas. Or we should be berating that kid working for minimum wage at the mall for wishing us Happy Holidays. Regardless of which path we choose, we should be roaming about this Winter Wonderland stressed out to the point of losing it with Here Comes Santa Claus stuck in our heads.
This is why finding diversion can be so difficult. Everyone is out with things to do, so all of the good TV shows like their cousins the Grizzly Bears go into hibernation until january. This leaves us fixing in very strange places. On Mondays, we should be waiting for 9 o clock to roll around to find out what's going to happen to the Heroes. Instead, we're TV DVD fixing, trying to cram all of Season 1 of Veronica Mars into less than a week. But, after three episodes, we begin to need a break frrom mysteries wrapped in mysteries wrapped into plucky blondes. So we tune into the Comcast and we flip and we find...nothing. We flip to all of our regular channels. Still nothing. Finally we end up somehow watching Mary, Mother of Jesus on TBN (they don't run commercials, they just get their money from the poor souls who actually believe that if they send $20 into the station, then Jesus will send them $40). The first thing that makes us stop is the very low production value. The second is that Jesus is Christian Bale. Low production value and Christian Bale just before he blew up again. I had to watch. Of course I did, there was nothing else on. So I watch til the end and after Mary has urged us to continue on with Christ's teachings, the credits roll and the movie is Executive Produced by Robert Shriver and his mommy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Just then it hits me. Some people already have what we all want. Their apartments can't get any bigger, their couches no nicer. They're set for life and they have tons of flat screens. These people don't sit around and daydream how to get or what it would be like to have all that shit, they are sitting around concocting schemes to keep it. They will fight us tooth and nail to keep the world running just the way it is so they won't be swept out of the oligarchy. That is why the Crouches (they who derive their wealth and power from the fear of the gays, the feminists and the secularists) are teaming up with the Kennedys (they who derive their power from those who fear those backwoods, theocratic zealots). Neither is really fighting this little cultural war that they've staged for our diversion. They are fighting together to maintain everything as it is. The Kennedys already placed a few chips on Schwarzenegger: why not the religious right? It's all about maintaining. They scratch each other's backs and trump up fights over social issues so none of us will ever think that maybe if we just took their big apartments and flat screens and couches, then ours would be bigger. Instead, they make us feasr each other and turn to them for protection. That's why they're alwways on top. But they could be a little more generous with their power; they could bring Heroes off of hiatus.