Count Your Broken Bones

Star Trek, the original but especially Next Generation, my primary indoctrination text on American exceptionalism and capitalist imperialism, we are good and kind and generous conquerors, yo, leaving galaxies of planets better for our conquering

I tried watching an original episode - the one with Nazis when Mike Pence played John Gill - a few months back, was awful and interminable, but today the centennial of Bones' birth, and since once upon a time I did watch it, day after day on reruns:

• I've never, can't, read or watch any other science fiction, I've tried, and I sure as fuck don't want to watch Bones argue with Spock ever again (or Picard on CBS now)
• The NYT editorial board and Bernie Sanders: These are broken people. They are influential, they have a tiny bit of power, but they are broken. The system has shaped them (no one gets near the top of the NYTimes without having kissed ass all their life) into the perfect servants to power. Their judgment is pure aesthetics; pure feel. It is nearly void of content. Yes, they oppose Sanders policies, but if they became the elite consensus, these people would adapt and defend them as fiercely as they do centrist politics. 
• Always decorum, never policy
• Who's the racist?
• Hostile environment (related to above)
• Blundering into war
• Reminder: obamapostasy
• Crackers and guns
• Deep Space Nine at least admits the possibility that we *aren't* good and kind and generous conquerors before determining that yes we are 
• City Status
• Voyager just sucks
• The chosen pig
• On listening to King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King

MY DEAR CONFLICTED READER

C.D. Wright

     If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature,and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direction we're headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume- and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their predestination. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplating a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy's school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off...

                                          Count your grey hairs

                                          Count your chigger bites

                                          Count your pills

                                          Count the times the phone rings

                                          Count your T cells

                                          Count your mosquito bites

                                          Count the days since your last menses

                                          Count the chickens you've eaten

                                          Count your cankers

                                          Count the storm candles

                                          Count your stitches

                                          Count your broken bones

                                          Count the flies you killed before noon