Back to the grind of government and business as usual. On this Memorial Day weekend, remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, whatever your views on the quagmire that is Iraq, spare thoughts and prayers for the servicemen and women now in Iraq and Afghanistan. By doing so, it seems you will be doing far more for them than is their own government.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld infamous, 'you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had'? (Pardon if the quote is inexact, but the message was and is clear.) Since then, since that response to servicemen and women's complaints about the equipment, what has changed? Very little.

I have a certain prejudice here because a recently released (or leaked) report indicates that of 100 urgent requests made by Marines in the field for equipment necessary both to complete their objectives and to maximize their chances for survival, less than 10% were met in the year from February, 2006 to February, 2007. So what has happened to the Bush administration's constant claim to 'listen to those armed forces on the ground in Iraq' (another paraphrase)?

When a vehicle has been designed and tested that could greatly reduce casualties inflicted by IEDs (roadside bombs), why has there been no push to move these vehicles through production and into operation? Who knows, but the Marines are still making do with bulked up Humvees that are not nearly as safe. And when a company has created a non-lethal laser that can temporarily blind a potential suicide bomber in a vehicle, when Marines have taken up collections among themselves to purchase such equipment, why have shipments and deliveries been blocked stateside and why is another company's less potent laser been taken in its place?

Budgetary concerns? Bureaucratic B.S. are the prevailing answers.

My point is this. On this Memorial Day, how about the US government remembering those service people still among the living and uninjured by supplying them with the equipment that maximizes their chances for survival. It just might make for better, more memorable Memorial Days for thousands of families in the future.

To all of you servicemen and women far from home on this holiday weekend, may you stay safe and well.

Frankly, I don't know why members of the Bush administration or Congress didn't think of this because Yahoo World News has come up with a novel approach to stemming the tide of illegal immigrants into the US.

MOVE MEXICO TO EUROPE!

It's true. At least for the time being, those masters of world geography at Yahoo are running an article about Mexican hotels and motels, carrying a Monterrey, Mexico dateline, under Europe(an) News. I just wonder if they plan to stick Mexico into the same slot they once gave New Zealand or Chile.

Kiwis are still smarting over that one. This is not to knock Chile - or Mexico either, for that matter - but so far as Kiwis know, they were the first country to be so relocated. And the geographic shift even fit the country's psyche where so many of its young people embark on 'The Great O(verseas) E(perience)'.

Imagine how thrilling that was for the large numbers of Kiwis who were never able to afford their own OE. Instead of being isolated by several hundred kilometers of water in any direction and enduring that sense of dislocation trying to adapt to the customs and mores of a foreign land with their own homes far far away, they could look forward to exploring these other countries knowing all the while that home was but a short jaunt away.

At least Kiwis were mentally prepared for the shift whereas for South and Central Americans it may come as quite a cultural shock when, instead of finding themselves in California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas, they instead cross the border and find themselves in Germany or France. Of course, I am just guessing that Mexico has been slotted into continental Europe. With Yahoo, there are no guarantees as New Zealand found when it was so summarily replaced by Chile. But if things continue, I believe I will propose my own solution, that we displaced countries get together and form our own continent, maybe New Chimexizealand.

The only trouble is, Yahoo would probably misspell it.

In a comment she left after my prior post, Bodacious_Southerner reminded me of one memorable trip we made together. On my part, there have been several more. I'm not sure which of them will come tumbling out of my memory, but I will try to record a few. Some were relatively short jaunts; others were much longer and actual road trips.

Firstly, a word about all of this. I did not obtain my driver's license until after my hitch in the Marine Corps and I think perhaps the combination of that fact plus the 'go where you're told, when you're told' regimen of military service built up pressure in me to go exploring once I did have a license and a vehicle of my own.

A further note: three Marine Corps buddies and I did make a drive from California, one as far as Tennessee, another to Pennsylvania, and the remaining two of us to New York State, but I have few memories of that excursion other than that it was long and that I managed to drop my cheapo camera over a guard rail on a mountainous road in Arizona. In my defense, I was leaning out the van window to snap a photo of some formation when our driver of the moment dropped the right front tire onto the narrow shoulder causing me to bump my head on the window frame - and if memory serves, my camera performed a Wile E. Coyote free fall.

Prior to that, over Labor Day weekend in 1971, eight of us crammed into a van and traveled from 29 Palms in California to Ensenada, Mexico where I traded my first cheapo camera and two rolls of film (plus one in the camera) to a couple of police officers to keep one of the other guys out of jail. (I always had visions afterward of one or the other officer having the nearly-used film in the camera developed and that our eight mugs occupy space in a Mexican family's photo album.) (Picture that. Kids leafing through snapshot portraits of their family's life and straying upon photos of rather unkempt Gringos and wondering 'who are these men?' And Dad perhaps embellishing the tale, recounting how he and his partner courageously faced down a band of American desperadoes.)

On that trip, JM had purchased fireworks in town and was letting some off on the beach when the two officers told us such activity was illegal, or that owning fireworks was illegal. Between our poor Spanish and their equally poor English, we never were quite sure of the charge(s). I remember mainly that we had little cash or anything of value by that point and that the camera-for-JM swap saved the officers having to let him go uncharged or actually taking him to jail.

I must confess that I was reluctant to part with my little - I believe it was a Brownie Instamatic or some such - camera despite JM's assurances that he would replace it for me once we got back to base. He was true to his word though and that was the camera I flung over the guard rail in Arizona, at which point I figured maybe God was trying to tell me NOT to pursue a career in photography - and never mind the allure of one day photographing Playmates for Hugh Heffner's magazine.

Traumatized and emotionally scarred for life from having lost two cheap cameras in about a month, I have steered clear of such endeavors ever after. (Yeah, right.) I did, however, retain my love for travel and for spouting the catch-phrase, 'wish I had a camera.'

Next up: most likely more journeys from my mind.

When I read Heide's blog piece about her childhood travels and the joys, I could not help remembering my own, rather more limited travels as a child. Apart from trips relatively close to home, the only places we went as a family were to New Jersey a time or three and once to Florida. (Well, the family went again the next year, but 'somebody' had to stay behind who knew my brother's paper route and could tend to my sisters' pets and my mom's plants, plus dig post holes for the new back porch. Three guesses who won the nomination because, after all, 'you don't have a cousin to visit down there' - meaning one my age and gender to hang out with. Oops! I gave away the answer.)

Heide's family clearly enjoyed the trips as much as or more than the ultimate destinations whereas my dad's philosophy - and he was the sole driver at the time - was to get from Point A to Point B by car roughly as fast as we could have made the trip by plane. In fact, I always had the sense we were in some sort of competition with either a relative or a friend or friend of a friend who had made the trip in X number of hours.

Think of it as a mobile version of Beat The Clock. And Dad invariably won, thank God. I'm not sure what would have happened had we not set a record getting from start to finish but I suspect either Dad or the car would have exploded.

Years later, when I moved to Kentucky, sometimes my folks would come for a visit while other times we would go to New York State. And it seemed that no matter what obstacles he faced, my dad could best any time I ever achieved between the two points.

How he managed this without ever receiving a gift from a state trooper somewhere in transit is beyond me. I used to see them across four states. And whenever I traveled, I found either: an accident blocking traffic, lousy weather and/or visibility, and always CONSTRUCTION IN CINCINNATI.

I swear, I never once entered southern Ohio without seeing road construction. In fact, I am certain Cincinnati is a Native American word that means; Land of the Orange Barrels.

Once, on a trip north, my son and I arrived, according to my dad, 'two hours late.' I just told him I couldn't find any of those places where you could get gas at a drive-through window while ordering food AND pay for everything with a large urine sample.

Nah. Truth be told, I have never been averse to a wander off the beaten path, even at risk of 'getting lost'. That's the real worry for most folks anyway, isn't it? I mean, apart from failing to set a speed/time record? Most longer trips are planned out in more detail than the Normandy Invasion.

Not so with me behind the wheel. So long as I trusted my vehicle, knew I had emergency gear on board, and had a general sense of the direction I wanted to go, I was willing to go. I set out with my first wife to visit her mom in Elmira, New York and wound up in Massachusetts visiting her grandparents over a holiday weekend. My second wife and I had to get off a main highway and search for gas another time and she got a bit worried because we had to travel so far and I refused to backtrack once we had found a service station. Instead, I forged ahead and took us back to the highway. She asked,

'how did you do this?'

I answered, 'I've been lost here before.'

I pulled a similar stunt via back roads in Ohio. Because of wretched visibility, we missed a turn that would have connected us to the Interstate we were seeking so I took a shot and picked the next north-south route, figuring we wanted to head south and westerly. Then I chose an east-west route and we traveled some back country. Just about the time wife was ready to panic, we arrived at a T-intersection and I said,

'all we have to do is turn left here, go down a way, and we'll come to the Interstate.' She asked how I could possibly know that and I told her,

'I was here with my former boss one time.'

We were way off the driving record time, but it was a memorable trip for all that. I just hope that by the time I am ready to retire, vehicle manufacturers and big oil will have combined forces to create economical cars and the material necessary to fuel them. There are still countless places I have never seen back in the US and as many areas where I have never had the pleasure of getting lost.

I doubt any of you really give a shit, but the American public is fed up with your politics as usual. That is why I have eschewed a humorous or satiric approach here and abandoned civility. Humor, satire, tact, and diplomacy are obviously lost on the lot of you.

I can hear you now: 'oh, boo-hoo. We're scared.'

You should be 'cause, guess what? We've got you and your bureaucrats way outnumbered.

By 'we', I mean 'we the people'. You may be vaguely familiar with us and as vaguely familiar with the phrase. In case you are not, I refer you to that oft-maligned and ignored document called: The Constitution of the United States of America. Go ahead and find it. I'll wait.

Got it? Now look at the Preamble and follow along:

'We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.'

Pretty basic, isn't it? The purpose of the Constitution is laid out for you right there. The thing is, it's also laid out for us, for 'we the people'. So I ask:

'what have you done toward establishing those precepts?'

'promote(d) a more perfect union'? Not so anyone can see. Looks more to me like the old 'divide and conquer' strategy. Keep us so preoccupied fighting and arguing amongst ourselves that we won't notice what a bunch of shitheads we've got supposedly representing us.

'establish justice'? Well there's a governmental department that bears the name, but its workings leave a hell of a lot to be desired. Looks more like it's been run as a 'good ol' boy' network. And anyone with eyes, ears, and, most especially, a working brain can see the unequal application of the law. If you're rich, you stand a good chance of grabbing a 'get out of jail' card. If you're poor, better be quick or your ass will be clamped in the cell doors as they close.

'insure domestic tranquility'? Don't make me laugh. According to a recent survey, 25% of Americans even count themselves satisfied. That means you've got 75% of us pretty disgruntled, and I doubt we have to include the 2.3 million people behind bars right now in that 75%. For all we know, 25% of inmates are content with where they are. At least they've got a roof overhead and food, plus medical care.

'provide for the common defense'? Well, you'd have us believe that's what all this war-mongering in foreign lands is all about, but the fact of the matter is, 'we the people' aren't really safe (or domestically tranquil) at home and we practically have to deny our heritage when we travel abroad. This bit applies especially to you Bushies in the administration. In fact, you're actions have given me reason to take off the kid gloves and drop any attempts at civility.

You guys wouldn't know diplomacy if it humped your legs. Instead, you have employed the tactics of a schoolyard bully, threatening economic or military actions against anyone who dares oppose you. In so doing, in the space of about one year, you managed to squander virtually unanimous sympathy and support among the world community in the aftermath of 9/11 and will be leaving one hell of a diplomatic mess in your wake.

'promote the general welfare'? This is nearly a bigger laugh than any of the rest. All you - and yes, Congressmen and women, this includes you - have done is to promote corporate welfare at the expense of 'we the people'. You have left the average man and woman so busy scrambling to make ends meet that any semblance of normality and normalcy has vanished. You have mortgaged our government to the Peoples Republic of China alone to the tune of $1 trillion dollars when the annual national budget is around $2.9 trillion.

Question: what happens if the Chinese suddenly decide not to play the finance game and call in their markers? How much of our country and our government do foreign interests already own?

'secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity'? The further I go, the more I am inclined toward sarcastic laughter. What you and yours are busily leaving to our 'posterity' is enslavement simply to pay off the excesses of today. Liberty? Hell! If you Bushies had your way, you'd have unlimited scope to spy on anyone, anywhere, anytime, all under the guise of 'national security' - and that is the biggest laugh of all. Take a survey. Ask Americans how truly 'secure' they feel in light of current events and the world-wide mood.

So here's what I am proposing to 'we the people'. Vote - and not on the basis of which candidate looks best or can deliver the best sound bites. Vote for the candidate who can not only recite at least the preamble to the Constitution but will pledge to uphold the standards set forth more than 230 years ago. Then maybe 2, 4, 6 years down the track, we will be able to see a true 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people'.