Go-Go Gadget Column!

  All five of you who don’t skip over the opinion page with the sometimes asterized banner atop it may have wondered what happened last week to this very column. Did “they” get to him? Was he silenced for daring to write against the empire? Did he get magically selected for an IRS audit for stating the fact that people here in Portland might be feeling a tad revolutionary?

  Actually, none of the above has happened… Yet. No, instead my column fell victim to the almighty Netflix.

  I plugged back into the grid, fired up the Wii for the first time since I bought it two years ago, and found exactly what the doctor ordered for the (greater) depression-era summer staycation: Inspector Gadget.



The inspector.

   That’s right. They’ve got all 86 episodes of the 1983-1986 hand-animated gems. So, instead of following the corrupt federal corporation posing as government, the inept state government reporting (surprise, surprise) revenue shortfalls from budget forecasts and our city’s clustereff.portland.gov taxation extraction machine; I followed Gadget, Penny, Dr Claw and the comedic stylings of Brain the dog.

  So I had nothing to write about, and I loved it. I can see why the last 30 or so years have been so great for the average American. I had not a care in the world. I consumed beverages high in high-fructose corn syrup, gained 5 pounds on five different varieties of Drakes snack cakes and even read an US magazine to satisfy my news appetite. In it, I even got to see a scantily-clad Miley Cyrus romping on the shore of some exotic locale smoking a butt. Did you know she smoked menthols? Hot.

  As the week wore on, I felt I had separated myself enough from reality to be able to fully function in what is now considered society. I even read a story about a recent visit by former first lady Barbara Bush to the children’s hospital at Maine Med without once even thinking about the irony of naming a center that heals children after the matriarch of a family whose member’s policies and warmongering directives over the years directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children around the globe. Not even once. The kids looked so happy in the picture accompanying the story. Isn’t that cute!

  I no longer felt estranged from society. I could log on to Facebook, and finally commiserate with what I used to consider one-time acquaintances, but now my true friends, about having “a case of the Mondays,” or even the excitement that comes with the Friday afternoon release from corporate wage-slave prisons – Err, rather – Can anyone say “Happy-hour time!?!” Bloomberg in my “news feed” reporting market volatility and Reuters on there spouting this or that about how the Fukushima meltdown is starting to look like a classic China Syndrome scenario and how experts are saying it’s about to set off a chain reaction and life on earth is basically effed? Um, I totally clicked the X and removed that drivel from the feed.

  I even saw postings from friends celebrating the success of rebels in taking down the evil Ghadaffi regime! “Go America!” they were yelling in a nutshell. I liked that my new Netflix-enchanted self didn’t stop to consider how the dictator was taken down not because he was evil, which he was, but rather because he dared to switch from basing his oil sales in dollars in favor of the euro and had recently entered into an agreement with China to sell them Libyan oil. No time for that kind of thinking – Big Brother is on, and Matt might get the boot this week. I figured I would tune back in when the real big brother got around to hanging Mohammar Saddam-style; Dangling the carrot of the noose on the screen and then cutting away right before the floor was dropped out from underneath him. That was fun, right? Totally.

  So as you can see, I was enjoying my week off from thoughts of anything based in the situation of now, which ‘taint pretty and is heading rapidly toward a state of global chaos. I was having so much fun I was willing to stay in this state until I was lying in the burned-out basement.

  Then it happened, an unmistakable sign of the end of days. Higgins is running for mayor. Suddenly, thrust back into reality by thoughts of cheesy-poofs and stinky feet in council chambers, I had no choice. The command was issued from the back of my mind: “Staycation over; Go-go gadget column.”

  See you next week.