Now What?

...to quote the immortal lament of the long-suffering General Halftrack in the "Beetle Bailey" comic strip.

Till yesterday, I was out in the Sonoran desert for another stretch, successfully ignoring the sorry media circus in Iowa -- a state that wily native son Meredith Willson churlishly depicted in the great American musical "The Music Man" as being populated by people who were narrow-minded, quarrelsome, cheap, parochial, and easy to manipulate. He'd have thought the same of the traveling salesmen among the media -- 2,500 of whom were accredited to cover the silly Iowa caucuses. This is the same news media that in general can't find 24 inches of print space or two minutes of broadcast time to cover the world.

Anyway, I find that it's way easier to ignore the clinical insanity of the presidential political process holed up in the desert -- but then I had to come home, now contemplating the meaning of whateverinhellthisisallabout.


Not to mention this, and this.

Sweet sufferin' Jayzus, is there any end to the insanity?

Oh, I almost forgot. The good news is that this a slow travel season, with the leisure-travelers in scant supply, and thus a very good time to use some of that play-money that is frequent flier miles. I flew Continental from Tucson to Newark in coach with a return to Tucson on Tuesday in first, all for a mere 35,000 miles.

As always, the advice here regarding miles is, if you got 'em, spend 'em. I'm headed back to the desert.

By the way, I know some people in southern Arizona whose opposition to the wall sealing off the border is based on the apprehension that if might prevent them from fleeing to Mexico, on horseback if necessary, till the presidential election blows over.

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