Ah, ideals! Pink and fluffy, lovely and sweet are our dreams and aspirations. The reality of dreams realized, however, often tells a different story, tales of failure, compromise and uneasy accommodation with harsh reality. And so we keep dreaming and striving, falling flat on our kissers, getting up, dusting ourselves off and gamely continuing to push our boulders up that hill. So, in the wake of Earth Day, that most idealistic of invented holidays, consider:

THE IDEAL: Earth Day. THE REALITY: Love Canal, Lake Erie, Mumbai, Chernobyl, New Jersey, strip mines, vanishing forests, acid rain…

THE IDEAL: Humane behavior. THE REALITY: Human behavior

THE IDEAL: The internet, a worldwide unifying web providing vast amounts of information, instant communication and an understanding between disparate peoples and societies. THE REALITY: Twitter.

THE IDEAL: The Olympics, an international sporting competition involving the world’s top athletes in a showcase of skill, speed, strength and grace. THE REALITY: Synchronized swimming, skiing while shooting a rifle and athletes of indeterminate gender on steroids.

THE IDEAL: Reality TV, celebrating the lives of ordinary people. THE REALITY: The waking nightmare that is Reality TV.

THE IDEAL: The United Nations, keeper of world peace, arbiter of international misunderstandings and champion of the world’s poor and underprivileged. THE REALITY: The United Nations, serial rebukers, spineless hand-wringers and squabbling adult children with no power and few good intentions. They have, however, cornered the market on strongly worded proclamations.

THE IDEAL: America. THE REALITY: President Obama with a giant mop and bucket trying to clean up the raw sewage left behind by Bush The Younger, Shotgun Dick Cheney, Rummy Rumsfeld, Brownie and ten thousand thieving corporate princes.

THE IDEAL: Religion, source of spiritual comfort, love, harmony and peace. THE REALITY: Religion, a handy excuse for hatred and slaughter with an invisible God to blame.

THE IDEAL: Green living. THE REALITY: Unreliable low-wattage light bulbs filled with mercury, Sports Utility Vehicles with giant V-8 engines, 40% of the world’s electricity produced by burning coal.

THE IDEAL: Medical research and the alleviation of mankind’s torment from devastating diseases. THE REALITY: Oxycontin, HMOs and phony attention-related syndromes.

THE IDEAL: The Year of The Child. THE REALITY: 12 million children dying every year from starvation and unsanitary water-related diseases.

THE IDEAL: The Asian Century.  THE REALITY: China and India being divided between educated, prosperous, healthy people and hundreds of millions of wretchedly poor illiterates living in The Bronze Age (see The Year of the Child).

THE IDEAL: A global economy. THE REALITY: Half the world’s 6 billion people still living in extreme poverty.

THE IDEAL: The end of Colonialism. THE REALITY: Tribalism, corruption, tyranny and genocide.

THE IDEAL: Universal equality. THE REALITY: Proposition 8, legally denying 5% of American citizens residing in California the right to marry.

THE IDEAL: American Idol. THE REALITY: Simon The Cruel.

And so it goes. Life has a way of letting us know that our ideals and reality rarely match. That gives us plenty to shoot for, and shows us we’ve got a lot of work to do. Which is just fine since people seem to be made for two things; to dream and to work. The trick we’re always trying to figure out is how to get these two functions to work together. As a race of beings, we humans have made a lot of dreams come true and come a very long way, but reality tells us not to get too giddy and get back to work. There’s miles to go before we sleep.

Newspapers will never be completely obsolete. People will always save historic headlines for posterity. Also, try lining the old birdcage or wrapping a fish with the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report. It’s problematic.

The other day was Holocaust Remembrance Day, recalling the time more than 60 years ago when an estimated 6 million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis in extermination camps. Joining the Jews as victims of this mass slaughter were almost 2 million Poles, 200,000 Roma and Sinti, also called Gypsies, a quarter of a million people with disabilities, between 10 and 20 thousand homosexuals and 2,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses. There is no exact body count, and untold numbers of souls died horrible and anonymous deaths, but enough records were kept to reach these accepted death toll figures. As time passes and survivors and eyewitnesses die, slimy Holocaust Deniers crawl from beneath whatever rock where they were spawned to try to rewrite history. 

Which is why Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, upon the discovery of the concentration camps, ordered his troops to take as many films and photographs that they possible could, because he correctly predicted that “the day will come when some son of a bitch will say this never happened.” Smart man, that Dwight D. Anti-Semites have been beating that drum for decades now, trying to duplicate the Big Lie theory put forth by the Nazis: “Say some thing loud enough and often enough and it becomes the truth.” Well, no. No it does not, Herr Jerkenhoffer, and doesn’t convince any reasonable person today. The Human Chihuahua that is president of Iran doesn’t qualify as a reasonable or realistic person, or even a person who is in control of the nation he nominally leads. There’s even bigger dunces running the show in Iran as the powers behind his tiny throne.

For anyone in doubt, the pictures are there, the films exist, the meticulous records the Germans themselves kept have been preserved in all their cold efficiency. Many of the camps still stand, with nobody willing to build and live where the stench of death and methodical cruelty poisoned the earth itself. Eisenhower’s vivid visual records and the corroborated testimony of many thousands of remaining eyewitnesses still haven’t shamed the Holocaust Deniers into abandoning their agenda of hatred, but they are basically harmless blowhards who everybody with half a brain knows are so full of shit they don’t even smell it anymore. More harmful are the Holocaust Emulators, the “ethnic cleansers” of the Balkan States in the 1990’s (around 100,000), the slaughterers of Rwanda in 1994 (800,000) and the mass murderers (to the tune of 1.7 million) in Cambodia in the 1970’s.

While none of these very recent incidents of genocide have produced the staggering numbers of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, it wasn’t for lack of trying. So far none of them have been able to match Hitler or his main rivals in genocide, good old Chairman Mao and Jolting Joe Stalin, good for tens of millions apiece “purged” (murdered). There are many more groups of vicious haters out there who would like nothing more that to murder every last man, woman and child of some target group or another in their beds, but lack either the balls, the brains or the ambition. Others who would practice what they preach in a heartbeat are thankfully short of the the weapons and the opportunity. Unfortunately, there are some who can and will carry out genocide again, and for all we know, someday break Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s records. There are many hate clubs seeking nuclear weapons, and no shortage of callous scumbags who will help them get their hands on some for a tidy profit. Genocide may yet see its most productive day.

This stuff has been going on since Biblical times, when some bigoted joker with an eye on some other tribe’s territory thought it would be a great idea to pretend it was God’s direct orders when the so-called Holy Scriptures commanded entire races of people “to be slain down to the last man, woman and child!” To their semi-credit, the Israelites of the Bible tales stopped short of complete annihilation, thus allegedly annoying the crap out of God for leaving a few victims alive. Can human beings ever truly convince themselves that mass murder is God’s will? You would think that the actual act of slaying a child would cure that notion pretty quick. Or at least hope that’s the case. There is only vengeance and hatred and personal gain involved, in Biblical times and today. Forget the holocaust? How can we? It’s not over yet. Like the song says: “How can I miss you when you won’t go away?”

Come to the BEAT BREAST CANCER CONCERT at DJ Ryder’s Rhythm & Brews, 3297 Long Beach Road, Oceanside, New York, 11572, (516) 992-8174. All proceeds go to the AVON WALK FOR BREAST CANCER. SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 26, 2009, 2:30 PM. Donation: $10 bucks cheap plus FREE FOOD.  The Bands:  BOB CRE$PO & THE BIG $PENDER$ – THE TASH BROTHERS BAND – THE FOSSILS

We fear and shun the mad because we are only inches away from being there ourselves. This is as unreasonable as madness itself. At least the mentally afflicted have a reason to be unreasonable. What’s our excuse?

Back in the days before paper money became popular, people were outraged that slips of paper would replace gold, silver and hard, tangible bartered goods. We moderns figured this was a pretty quaint and antiquated notion, but every so often when the economy goes haywire you begin to understand those early fears. Today in Zimbabwe, just as it was in Germany following World War One, the paper currency is practically worthless, with a wheelbarrow full of it not even buying enough food to feed a family for one day. Even stable currencies fluctuate in value and are subject to inflation. Has there ever been a generation of grandparents who bragged at how much more things cost back in their day?

And now you hear economists tell us that in America, 11 trillion dollars worth of wealth has disappeared in the past year and a half. Where did it go? Who’s got it? If it was a real commodity, like say, shoes, then you could figure out where all the shoes went, no problem. Just check everybody’s closet and see who’s joined the Imelda Marcos club. But the money just seems to have vanished into thin air. So, was it ever really there in the first place? Or is money the one item that defies the immutable laws of physics, the ones that tell us that matter can neither be created or destroyed?

But physics also tells us that matter can be transformed, such as wood into ash and smoke, various metals into steel and food into shit. So, was that 11 trillion turned into a pile of shit? No one burned it and there hasn’t been a glut of steel on the market, but there seems to be no shortage of bullshit lately when it comes to explaining where the money went. But that can’t be, either, since nobody ate the 11 tril. Or maybe it’s just that the money never existed in the first place except in our minds. When you have an economy based on what people think something is worth as opposed to what it is actually worth, well, there can never be a hard definition of how much wealth exists.

That 11 trillion had to be air money, wish wealth or whatever else you’d like to call something that can be created and destroyed without any actual physical occurrence. You sure couldn’t make 11 trillion pairs of shoes evaporate without one hell of a fire. Shoes are real, we put them on every day and acquire new ones all the time. While they wear out and and lose substance from the friction of walking, no one ever had a pair of shoes they used until they completely vanished, and even if they did, that would take many decades. So how does that happen with 20% of a nation’s wealth unless it was never there in the first place? Who built this house of cards?

There is a famous painting by Rene Magritte called “The Treachery of Images.” On the canvas is a painting of a tobacco pipe. Beneath the image is the caption saying: “This is not a pipe.” This exercise in pointing out the obvious was as usual lost on many people. To them, that painting of a pipe was a pipe, even though you couldn’t hold it, put in your pocket, stuff it with tobacco or light it up and puff away. It was an image. Is our money that pipe? It can’t be all that illusory, otherwise you wouldn’t have rich and poor. If being wealthy was merely a matter of having a deeper belief in the illusion of money, then we’d all be ultra-orthodox priests of finance. So, scratch that.

Somewhere between the belief in wealth and the reality of worth we run our world’s economies. Exactly where the line is drawn between faith and actuality will never be truly defined, but you have to figure that at least some of the missing 11 trillion dollars never existed. When you buy a house for $200,000, unlike a pair of $50 shoes, you don’t have $200,000 dollars handy. And so you borrow a ton of money that you never see or handle from a bank, which they never see or handle either, and pay the house off over a period of 30 years with money you do see and handle, money you have worked hard to earn. It’s mysterious but it works. That is, it works when the economy is booming.

When 5 years down the line somebody tells you that your house is now worth $350,000 dollars even though you’ve done nothing but paint the garage and mow the lawn, you wonder what magic has been wrought. That $50 pair of shoes you bought the same week you got the house are long gone, worn out and worth nothing. But your house, which may also be worn out and looking pretty shoddy, is now worth a small fortune more than what you actually didn’t pay for it since you bought it with a promise. But if you sell your house that day for $350,000 you make a real profit of $150,000, money that if you like you can convert into cash and see and feel and handle and smell and cover your bed with and jump into it like a pile of leaves.

Now, if you are the person who buys that house for $350,000, and the economy goes south like it just did, you might find yourself on the hook to pay off $350,000 for a house that is suddenly worth only $200,000 again. So now you’ve got several problems; the government still taxes you like your house is worth the 350k, you lost your job and now you can’t afford to live there anymore. Now the system is still mysterious but in this instance, it does not work. So you either abandon the house or the bank takes it from you forcibly, but either way, that huge loan won’t be repaid and the house cannot be sold for what is was guessed to be worth and so the economy is smaller by $150,000. 

Multiply that by millions of homes and you start to get a feel for where that 11 trillion bucks went. It went nowhere, because it was never there. Now factor in larceny, fraud and greed at the highest levels of our economic hierarchy, people who were supposed to know better and, more importantly, do better, it becomes clearer still. People who this system made wealthy suddenly as a pack decided they needed to become fabulously wealthy, and so packaged all these countless $150,000 losses into attractively gift-wrapped bundles of bullshit and sold them to one another in a game of financial hot potato, hoping this fraud would last at least until they dropped dead and then it would be somebody else’s problem. Well, it didn’t and here we are wondering what’s real and what’s fake. For lack of a better image, let’s just say about our economy that it was not a pipe. More of a pipe dream.

Life has a rhythm and an enduring pattern that must be respected. So men, it is important to take care of your health so you can at least live long enough to be an embarrassment to your teenagers.

You’ve got to love proverbs. Some of of them are really on the money, enduring bits of wisdom that always apply no matter how old they are, things like “Love is blind” and “A man is known by the company he keeps.” And then there’s some that are kind of quaint and dated, like “A stitch in time saves nine.” Who sews anything anymore in this age of $5 Walmart shirts? Still, proverbs are important tools to put our lives in perspective and to illustrate what all people have in common. As a public service, the extensive research department here at bobcrespo.com has been busy digging up proverbs for the modern age, to update the proverb experience for future generations. Consider these:

No man is an island, but some of us fat bastards are getting there.

It takes two to Twitter.

Where there’s smoke there’s Rastafarians.

There is no honor among hackers.

All is fair in love and war and play station.

The fool wonders, the wise man Googles.

Botox is only skin deep.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man miss Letterman.

When in doubt, stay there. Learning is a chore.

A Myspace page isn’t built in a day.

Diamonds are forever, and don’t lose their value when the economy blows up in our faces.

A 401K in the hand is pretty useless.

As ye program, so ye download.

Many are called, but few are worth the minutes.

Honesty is the best policy except when your wife asks if this dress makes her look fat.

You can run but cannot hide from Predator drones.

Water, water everywhere, for $1.50 a bottle.

Home is where your heart is, under whatever bridge that might be after the bank takes your house.

Alpo is only dog food when eaten by a dog. Under the bridge, it is called “hobo stew.”

The meek shall inherit the deficits.

Music soothes the savage beast, except for death metal and gangsta rap, which only fuels his insatiable rage.

When the fat lady sings, Simon Cowell barks.

The Lord loves drunkards and fools, but despiseth the repo man.

Facebook does not a true friend make.

You cannot photoshop the face in your mirror.

One picture is worth a thousand words, but a thousand pictures of your dog will convince no one it is precious.

Live and learn. Or not.

A job worth doing is worth doing sedated.

Only the good die young, and the rest of us get to take their stuff.

The proof of the pudding is in the chemical additives.

Many hands make light work, except when it comes to making broth.

You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear, but if you label it “Grucci” you can sell it on Canal Street.

Curiosity killed the cat, cloning brought it back.

Lots of money makes even Mr. Potato Head handsome and witty.

Never spend your money before you have it, unless you are a giant bank or the government.

Who can deny, a proverb beginning with “who can deny” is annoying?

When some people get laryngitis, no one is disappointed.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has, as always, been scouring the globe for the readily apparent. Also as usual, the Department has many rivals for pointing out the forest for the trees. The latest DOPOTO impersonator is one Steve Schmidt, the campaign manager for Senator John McCain’s failed presidential bid in the 2008 election. While trying to get a grumpy old man elected president is an unenviable task, especially when said grumpy old man picks as his running mate a decidedly bizarre and ignorant bimbo from Alaska, Mr. Schmidt did his best. The man is a professional and a talented political operative who has the misfortune to be working within the framework of a dying political party.

The Republican Party was coming off eight years in power under President Bush The Younger, during which time they failed to make even one correct decision and made a bigger mess of America than was thought to be humanly possible. By the time the 2008 elections rolled around, the American people had their fill and overwhelmingly delivered the White House and both houses of Congress to the Democrats. These things happen from time to time in American politics, and the defeated party retrenches and eventually bounces back. This time, however, the Republican Party is in such disarray that it may split into one or more new political parties, one for the religious right wing, another for the corporate thieves, perhaps yet another for the simply power mad.

Which is where Steve Schmidt entered the business of pointing out the obvious. In a speech before the Log Cabin Republican convention, Mr. Schmidt declared that religion is ruining the Republican Party. He stated that a political party is no place to formulate policies based on religious faith, figuring that people with differing religious beliefs would be driven away, and others reluctant to join. This has been a serious problem for Republicans for many years, but only Steve Schmidt has been willing to talk about the 800 pound gorilla in the room. He reasons that if the party announces itself to be ordained by God, only zealots, professional killjoys and would-be Messiahs will remain in the fold.

And so DOPOTO, being experts in the field of pointing out the obvious, is more than willing to share the results of our research into the matter. It seems that around the time of Ronald Reagan, Jesus Freaks started getting themselves politically organized. Prior to that time, Jesus Freaks were basically mentally imbalanced and very disoriented individuals that others went to great lengths to avoid, so they decided to clean up their acts, band together and go mainstream. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, that is where the Jesus Freaks gravitated. Even more unfortunate, their new status as respectable citizens did not temper their extremely annoying personalities or their odd tendency to condemn most of humanity to the eternal damnation of Hell Fire, as if that was within their power.

At first they organized a local election here, a statewide victory there, and gradually became a national presence, sending Congressman and Senators to Washington and Governors to state capitals. And like any zealots who get a taste of power, theirs went right to their pointy little pin heads. Before long they were announcing that anyone who disagreed with them were in an open alliance with Satan and they finally got one of their fellow dimwits elected president, the aforementioned Bush The Younger, the black sheep of the very wealthy and powerful Bush family. Himself a lifelong failure, a complete idiot and a born-again Christian, he set records as the Governor of Texas for executing retarded teenagers and clearing brush at his ranch, a never-ending obsession in dry and brushy Texas. His presidency not only put America in dire straits, but left the Republican Party in a shambles.

Such is their disarray that the current capo-di-tutti-capo of the Republican Party is now Rush Limbaugh, the ignorant radio buffoon most famous for his addiction to Oxycontin (hillbilly heroin) and wishing failure for his nation’s president. A warmonger who never wore a uniform, a self-proclaimed intellectual who failed out of college after two semesters (failing even a ballroom dancing class!) and a serial marrier, Mr. Limbaugh is himself not a religious man but is an expert blowhard adept at pandering to religious weirdos. His only rival for the title of Republican Head Honcho is the disgraced former Speaker of The House, Newt Gingrich, a man who changes religions as often as he changes wives. Newt is best known for obsessing over President Clinton’s penis and handing his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital sick with cancer so he could marry his trophy wife (who he has since traded in for a newer, presumably trophier, model).

So, Mr. Schmidt, the God Squad is only one of your party’s problems. The party that in recent times was the home of smart people like Jacob Javits, Margaret Chase-Smith, Everett Dirksen, Henry Cabot Lodge, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, the Republicans haven’t had a leader of any political talent or intellectual substance since Richard Nixon, and he was a paranoid crook who resigned in disgrace. While they still proudly call themselves “The Grand Old Party” and “The Party of Lincoln,” many people figure it was all downhill after Honest Abe and that the only thing “Grand” about them is larceny. 

None of these former Republican leaders would qualify for inclusion in today’s GOP, not being anywhere near unreasonable or insane enough, even Nixon. The Christian Fascists currently running the show at the GOP are the final nail in the coffin of the Republican Party. Naturally Mr. Schmidt’s speech was received about as well as the Captain of The Titanic greeted that news that his unsinkable ship was taking on water faster than Rush Limbaugh washing down a few fistfuls of Oxy. Some even banished him to Hades for the sin of describing the emperor’s new clothes. This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.