Our Secret Virtual Lives

By TRB

John Lennon was so right when he called humans "victims of the insane." I am sure you have been watching this Rep. Weiner thing play itself out and you have wondered what is up with the world. Is technology going to create make-believe or virtual worlds that are actually seen as real or even more real than reality?. This sexting thing is a riot in my estimation.

No one is having sex, and yet already some regard it as more intimate than the real thing. How is that for insane? So Weiner, and we assume some lonely women, exchanged electrons or microwaves over great distances that were then digitized to look like the real thing which wasn't there. They didn't touch. They did not engage in any physical romance. They never even met. But he is forced to resign from Congress they say because he lied about it. Well. It must be embarassing to be that lonely or hard up so I can understand where the truth was just out of the question.

We spent two whole weeks of this month in the virtual world of Weiner's tame and frankly boring virtual sex life. Meanwhile, more people lost jobs. But Weiner's virtual sex life led the news. More people lost their homes. But Weiner's virtual sex life led the news. Who is sicker, Weiner or us?

Since when did virtual stop being virtual and start being real?

If this is to be the case there is so much more we could make virtual, don't you think? I not only think in the affirmative, but I believe we have been doing this for a very long time. Just go back to Iraq and count those virtual nukes and the virtual chemical weapons that led to the real war.

We have a virtual debt ceiling that we're trying to nudge a little higher that will probably virtually be the end of the dollar, in part because Greece is virtually broke.

Meanwhile in the real world, we are told that this nation is losing jobs that it will never get back. Millions of jobs. More trouble for the real world. It is not a fun place to hang out in anymore. Everything costs too much. Millions of people lose their homes to foreclosure. Our rights are taken away as if the Constitution didn't exist.

We are 38th in health care. Guns are everywhere. The FDA has to admit that it has approved poisons that have been in our food for decades. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. If you have the money you have a better chance of living long enough to get off that operating table. We are fighting a senseless war with Afghanistan, that is really a war against Pakistan.

We are fighting an illegal war with Iraq while swearing that we are pulling out. Tell it to the 5 GIs who died there last week.

Now we're in Lybia fighting an expensive air war chasing down a nutcake who lives in pajamas and who has to erect a tent everytime he goes to the bathroom. And we can't even find this looney, just fragments of his tents.

Here at home we are busy filling up the privately owned prisons. They need your support. Forty percent of the average politician's campaign funds come from the banks so we have a system run by banks.

Obama has been out to lunch for a while. He just keeps promising those jobs that don't appear. He extends tax cuts for the uber rich, he cuts programs that would feed impoverished children in the inner city. He kept his Attorney General on a leash so we can't investigate how terribly wrong things have gone in the financial markets and make them right.

He is on everyone's side. Mine, yours - not Weiners though.

You see Weiner didn't do anything real. His sin was virtual, and that, well, that's just sick. How do you figure a guy like that when most of them in Washington are doing the real thing and no one raises an eyebrow? Why didn't he just hop in the sack with a warm body? We wouldn't even be hearing about this now.

The really sick part of this is that real life needs a rest, or rather you need a rest from real life. Pretty soon we won't be allowed to do virtually anything.