The Revolution Over There

Somewhere in the near future, a kid will come up to me and ask what happened back in 2011. I’ll think really hard and remember that Charlie Sheen got everybody at CBS pissed at him, that his boss made half a billion dollars creating a funny show that lasted about nine seasons, and if you waited a couple years, you could get the whole thing on DVD for about twenty bucks at Costco.

I’ll remember that Tiger Woods’ conscience kept him from winning anything since last Thanksgiving, when he drove his SUV into a tree. I’ll remember that gas prices kept going up and down and up again, and we weren’t really sure who to blame for it anymore. It snowed and rained a lot everywhere, and so the TV weather people got to wear a lot more different outfits for their Stormwatch segments.

By the way, I’ll tell the kid, there was this democratic revolution that happened in the Middle East, a whole bunch of countries that all of a sudden decided they didn’t like dictators anymore, and so they stood in public to say so. Many of them got shot and died, and a bunch more got the crap beat out of them, and others went to prison and were never seen again. And even after all of this, these Middle Eastern people didn’t give up and they kept revolting, using the Internet and their cellphones to spread the word. News crews from around the world got a hold of their stories and spread the word out even more, so much so that even news people got the crap beat out of them when they showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anderson Cooper got punched a dozen times and Katie Couric got shoved around, but I’m not sure if she got hit.

This changed the world much like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union back in the early nineties. I remember back then, all the TV and radio stations were glued to what was happening in Europe and Russia, and nobody wanted to see or hear about anything else, because it was a big deal. Then there was Desert Shield which became Desert Storm. That had Schwarzkopf with his camouflage uniform, Rumsfeld with his podium updates, George Bush Senior getting a standing ovation from everybody in Congress, and Colin Powell looking like he was going to run for president one day, but he never did. I remember the first time they showed a stealth fighter and a stealth bomber, and how friggin’ accurate those things were, and how when they bombed a tank or a bunker where people were hiding, it looked like an old video game.

But yeah, in 2011, people played Angry Birds on their iPads and iPods and iPhones because Sudoku was already getting boring. Robert Rizzo from the city of Bell got caught paying himself and his city council members too much money, and then other officials from other cities got caught for the same thing, even though it’s been happening for decades. This snowballed into other cities and states, and pretty soon every government office was being audited. It’s like a trend, just like when Egypt started with their revolution, then Libya and the other countries followed.

I’ll tell the kid that I still read whatever newspaper I could get my hands on, the Times or Wall Street Journal, whatever was around, even though most newspapers had already gone out of business. I’d get a whiff of the story from someone on TV saying something quick about it, then I’d check it on the Internet, then I’d get the complete story by reading the paper. I usually only get to read the whole story every other day or so, because the newspaper vending machine is always out of the L.A. Times, or I don’t have three quarters on me and it’s too far to walk to the bookstore a block away. I get to read the paper when I’m having my toasted wheat bagel with honey almond shmear, and my French roasted coffee, four sugars and four creams.

I always finish my bagel and coffee, but I don’t always finish reading the paper.