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Any extinct culture's sayings might survive the test of time even though the culture don't, because their sayings are either universal memes or they're not. A culture's memes (in the form of their proverbs and sayings) doesn't have to be universal or even true. They work because they're intoned by a master orators, and with the lack of a current magnetic lead speaker, the sayings are impotent.
The master orator some people appear to extol the praises of is not Jesus or Mohammed or Gautama the Buddha, but Rush Limbaugh. Was his recent marriage an abdication of the throne to Sarah Palin? I don't understand the attraction. Granted, I might be looking at it from an arrogant, bigoted perspective, and not trying to be level-headed at all. I have a choice. Why would I not?
A blasphemous thought occurred that maybe with all Palin's kids and her husband Joseph, she's actually the Holy Mother and a Tea Bagger to boot. This can't have a good end. It's the classical War Of The Gods, and nobody is gonna win or... for the most part... survive. They're not supposed to. This planet's problem with becoming Utopia is that it has too many people to carry on it's back. Palin will solve that problem. The great unwashed, like those wolves in her back yard in Alaska, gotta go. No blame.
Watching documentaries on PBS and perhaps the History Channel seems natural for older folk like me. I can only write about PBS because cable don't reach this far out, and I can't afford the satellite dish thingie. It doesn't seem to matter much. There is so many reruns I can start talking about something I saw recently about wild animals, and many of the older folk sitting around me will nod and say "Amen!" to that.
Now, with the big oil spill threatening all the areas the conservationists have held up as a model for the universe, it's not so much fun to watch the documentaries about the coral reefs off Florida being put off-limits to bottom trawlers like shrimp fishermen to save what's left of the reefs. The oil will kill all the reefs and all the life that depend on them. Kaput! It's over. What a drag, man.
This is not news to me. I worked in Southern Louisiana helping build an oil separator plant not two hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico. The oil being pumped up through the oil rigs out in the Gulf got pumped from there to one of these separator plants where the oil was semi-refined into three grades with gasoline being the lightest.
This place was a few miles west of Holly Beach, Louisiana. It was a beach town nicknamed The Cajun Riviera because so many Cajun people had summer cottages there. I was told that at one time that Holly Beach was THE place to be to party on the weekends for the Cajuns from all over southern Louisiana.
I believed that part. There was a crossroads in the middle of a huge bird refuge between Holly Beach and Lake Charles, Louisiana where the party life continued. Man, those Cajuns have a good time what am!
They have a good time inland at that crossroads because of what happened at Holly Beach. It was a collecting point for all the trash and spilled oil from the thousands of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. The Cajun Riviera became a dump. I guess the rest of the beaches around the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and most of the resort areas along the southeastern Atlantic coast is or will be joining Holly Beach in their depraved shame.
I not only worked construction in southern Louisiana, but I worked on a few shrimp boats there too. A lot of the shrimpers there had shallow-draft wooden boats they inherited from their families. They've been shrimping the shallow waters just off the coast for decades. Once upon a time they used wooden sailboats to drag for shrimp. It's hard work and easy occupation to poor mouth. Now they got nothing but family pride, but about what? Is the Cajun culture a failed political state. In the last couple of years Cajun power has had a hard blow to what was left of their tenuous culture.
Candidly, their situation isn't any different than what happens when natural disasters strike anywhere in the world. They gotta move to a happening place. The people there won't like it, and it might be unpleasant to have to change they ways. But, "... life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone."
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
