September 11th: A Pointless Story

This is completely irrelevant, but anyway…

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was riding the bus to work as usual. I never listen to any TV or radio news in the morning, so I hadn’t learned about the attacks yet. Later on during the bus ride, a coworker got on and told me all about it.

When I got on the bus I had that morning’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle (as usual). Their front page story was about a guy somewhere in California — I forget where — who did the standard cliché of killing several people and then killing himself. Before he killed himself he made a video and sent it to the local police department, confessing everything. At the end of the video he said “well, this oughtta keep me on the front pages for a week or so.”

Oh, and don’t forget — for the people of Chile, September 11th has a totally different meaning.

United States Losing Influence in Latin America

And now, straight from the cover of DUUUHHH!!! Magazine: the United States has been exerting less and less influence in Latin America. Oh My God, No!! After all we've done for those dark-skinned funny-talking furriners, and they're turning against us?!?!?

Well, true, we did engineer a coup in Chile that resulted in thousands of citizens being tortured and/or executed. And twenty years earlier we did the same thing in Guatemala. And we tried (unsuccessfully) to do the same thing in Venezuela a few years ago. And we've been trying (again unsuccessfully) for almost fifty years to do the same thing in Cuba. Goddamnit, won't that stubborn Communist ever die??

Oh, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega — we even got help from our second worst enemy in the world in trying to overthrow that #$%$#!$&!! — is now back in power. And some of those South American countries are still growing coca leaves, even though we've pleaded and pleaded with them to crack down on it because we have a bunch of wealthy teenagers in our own country who keep getting themselves addicted to a byproduct of coca leaves. But those damn governments keep whining at us, something about coca leaves being the only livelihood of thousands of dirt-poor farmers, or something. WhatEVer!

And now we’re losing influence among these people. But, but, Why???