The saying “There's a sucker born every minute.” has been kicking around since the late nineteenth century. The indomitable American “can do” attitude has made that adage an extremely lowball estimate. I watched a video clip on Crooks & Liars the other day excerpted from Cashin' In, a Fox News program hosted by Eric Bolling. It weirded me out so much I had to click on over to the Fox News website and watch the entire segment. I’ve never done that before. I don’t have the stomach lining for Fox. But this was so compelling I had to.

But first …

We’ve all received the scam email about helping a wealthy Nigerian move his millions out of the country into American banks. If you agree to help the guy out you get to keep a huge percentage of the money. The cost to victims of these advance-fee frauds like the Nigerian bank scam went from $100 million in the U.S. in 1997 to an estimated $6.3 billion in 2008 and $9.3 billion in 2009 worldwide.

Mano Singham writing about the scam in Freethought Blogs said, “I am pretty certain that all the readers of this blog have received similar appeals. I am also certain that all of us have been struck by the sheer crudeness of the messages that make them seem such obvious scams that only an idiot would fall for, and asked ourselves why they don’t try to make it at least a little more sophisticated so that they have a better chance at success? It turns out that a computer scientist at Microsoft … did a cost-benefit analysis and realized that this crudeness is a feature, not a bug.”

The cost of paying attention keeps going up:  Increasing cases of thyroid growths near Fukushima.  Tar sands.  Poisoned water supplies.  Drones.  North Korea.  Corporate welfare.  Tainted and questionable food supplies.  Chemical weapons.  Gun violence.  Man-made gases eating the ozone shield.

There's even a recent report of a dormant virus coming back to life after a nap of 30,000 years.  After a run through the headlines, I'm feeling very much like I could use a nap of a few thousand years myself.

As hazardous to one's sense of calm as is trying to stay abreast of current events, it's even more dangerous to one's head wiring to start connecting the dots between disparate events.  That's where you go from losing peace of mind to shredding, and shedding, pieces of mind.

Show you what I mean:  What do you do with the realization that your country and culture is a death cult?  Taken individually, there are a number of troubling points of concern.  They go deep.  Added up, and you start to feel like an accidental conspiracy theorist, thunderstruck on a sunny day, zapped by a bolt from blue sky, holding the lightning rod high when the Big Paranoias have come out to play.

Y'know why I often refer to the Universal Studios monsters from the thirties and forties? Because those were the monsters I grew up with. In the fifties, the studio packed up its classic horror films and sold them to television. Every Saturday night I would be in front of our black and white Zenith from 10:30 pm until signoff watching channel 11s Nightmare. That's where I discovered Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man. Thats when I learned The Monster Rules. Everybody had to learn The Monster Rules because if you didn't there was no way in hell you could ever get to sleep after watching Nightmare.

The most important rule was Monsters Could Be Killed. It might take the whole movie to do it, but in the last few minutes of the final reel Dracula was staked, Frankenstein's monster was burned alive in a flaming windmill, the Egyptian goddess Isis reduced the mummy Imhotep to dust, and Larry Talbot, The Wolf Man, was beaten to death with a silver walking stick wielded by his own father. When all the monsters had been dispatched I could climb the darkened stairway up to my room without being too scared. Until I saw Dracula.

Every once in a while, I want to write a note,  roll it up, and jam it into a old milk bottle.  The scribbling part is easy.  The tough part comes when trying to decide where to deliver it.  There are not many outlets around willing to accept delivery on such a thing, and even fewer staff people able or interested enough to pay much attention to such a note, especially for one beginning this way:

"I see by the clock on the clubhouse wall, and by the full-faced frown on the burly, white-uniformed orderly I can't seem to shake, that it's time for a nice, hot cup of Thorazine and some phosphene therapy, staring off into space, my eyes shut tight..."

Such lightless light shows like this, like life, are sometimes called "prisoner's cinema."  This seems fitting.  I often feel like a prisoner of my era, of this historical cycle in which we are now treading water, waiting for the next chapter to start, the next shoe to drop, the next shot from the starter's pistol, the next tick of the clock...

Most of us get used to living in clusters of contradictions.  Hypocrisy is part of the human condition, and irony is Nature's way of trying to lure us toward more introspection and humility.  And, once those forces are in play, we gain perspective and are able to laugh at ourselves and the absurdities of life.

This is healthy and is supposed to work that way -- at least, once the laughing finally dies down a little.  But, you know, difficult truths that fuel our recognition and laughter can sometimes linger and fester.  I fell over another one of these today.  I am still not certain how I feel about any of it.  Still thinking on it.

The conflict and conundrum of the moment starts out being an easy one:  All life is sacred.  Then, gravity goes bonkers while we form the question:  So, why are we such a death cult of a society?  There are side branches to this stuff, and it runs off in all directions, once you get started on it.

For example, if life is so precious to us, as we espouse, why the endless fascination with murder and killing?  Count the number of times in just one day in which death and dying keep us entertained:  TeeVee shows, movies, books, news shows, and so on.

It's nice of the universe to cut me some slack now and again.  Usually, life serves up swarms of fastballs quicker than a bank of berserk robo-pitchers in a major league batting practice, making me the unwitting mole in the Whac-A-Mole game, getting bonked witless, and scared, um,  excretion-less.

Whatever.  Life is probably quite good at throwing racetrack walls at you, too, just as you're punching out of the turn, just in time to catch sight of the slippery, surprise pool of motor oil now under your racing slicks -- apparently and simultaneously, according to your vision, both beneath and above your cartwheeling car frame as it bash-dances on the track.

Yeah, I've hit that same wall, on fire, and at a high rate of speed, as it is said.  Life has no compunctions about such things.  I try to not take things personally, even when it is damn personal and completely unpersonable.

Usually, The News is the instigating propellant in this mad equation of consciousness.  I have no idea what 9 out of 10 doctors may make of things, but, for me, The News makes me foamingly loco about 479 times out of 10, not to put too fine a point on it.

The plan here:  Impossible math counters insane developments -- I hope -- or, at least provides some sort of interim shield, like zombies passing up unhealthy hosts.  The more I stroke out at The News, the universe provides more counterbalancing fluff pieces.