Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008 )

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has released a scathing indictment of his one-time boss, president George W. Bush, accusing his former superiors in the administration of pushing propaganda and untruths at every level to effect their policies. He even blames the media for being too complicit in the spin doctoring going on. In other words, he is mad that he believed the president’s lies. And he blames the media for believing these same lies that he himself believed. Which ultimately means he blames the media for believing him.

How is this kind of ongoing denial and the echo-chamber of non-critical thinking affecting us as everyday Americans? What if we did this in our own interpersonal relationships?

–*”Honey, you should have known that when I told you I wanted you to buy me eggs, I didn’t really mean for you to put on your clothes, go out the front door, drive five miles to the supermarket to buy me eggs. It was just something wives say.”

–*”Son, you should have known that when I told you I was having a heart attack and needed emergency defibrillation that I was doing it just as a way to get you to come visit me at the house, which you never do. I’m old! This is all your fault.”

–*”John, when I told you to make love to me, you should have known later that I would file for sexual harassment. You have to know that sometimes even when a girl says yes, she means no.”

–“Honey, when I made a vow to be faithful, you should never have believed that I wasn’t going to sleep with your much sexier sister.”

–*”Teacher, when I said I was going to the bathroom, you should have found it extremely suspect, since you can tell, just by looking at me, that I am the kind of person who is going to go sell crank in the parking lot instead. I mean, believing me was really a sucker play.”

–*”Actress Ellen Barkin, you should have known when you married me, billionaire trophy wife collector Ronald Perelman, when I said “I love you ’til death do us part,” that given my history with divorces, in which the harpies have eaten me alive through my munificent alimony checks, I would not likely really be with you until death do us part, and that when I say I love you it is actually a fleeting chemical sensation and hormonal impulse–part of a yeasty mix of endorphins, the male posturing genetic traits of my gorilla ancestors in the subtropical forests, and the lubricant of unfathomable wealth that is the background for the attitude and style of our mating dance. You should have known this, actress Ellen Barkin, and for you not to have seen through it is just willful, stubborn, prideful female arrogance.

–*”Mommy, you should have known I would throw that cookie on the floor. I am only 2. Shit head.”

–*”People, you should have known I would lie to you. Being president means it is not exactly possible or desirable to tell the truth to people all the time, especially when they are the different constituent parts of a commonwealth who are all like selfish children who refuse to compromise or see eye to eye on anything.”

–*”You should have known when you were asking how my day went and I said “OK,” that it was just a manner of speaking and that my day is actually like something clumped to a buffalo’s ass and that I expect a certain amount of seclusion to deal with it and so, no, I didn’t really want to go to lunch with you.”

–*”You should have known when I said that I was “Joe Millionaire” that you are on a TV game show and that there is something disingenuous about having our love play out in front of a Fox television crew, the primary artifice of the whole affair likely being that I am not actually a millionaire.”

–*”You should have known that when I said I had cracked the Oklahoma City bombing case that I am Gore Vidal and that I have blown a lot of smoke up your ass in the past about things that turned out to not be the case.”

–*”You should have known that parts of my book “Roots” weren’t really true and that it was largely a work of fiction. I mean, obviously it would be hard to research a lot of that stuff.”

–*”You should have known that today’s “Beauty is Imperfection” blog might not have been funny. I mean, it’s hard to write every day, and “The Tudors” is on.”