One might think that this cartoon from this week's NEW YORKER magazine (be sure to click to enlarge), which uses an old punchline from the 1920's which originally had to do with yachts to make a point about our country's situation today, "says it all".
While it's a typically NEW YORKER-ish snobby-yet-witty take on "what must be going on in the suburbs," keeping the magazine's urbane and sophisticated readers (or those who pretend to read it while waiting at their doctor's office) informed on the perils of not living in a metropolis, we've come across a French Press Agency (AFP) article which ran on the Web worldwide today, May 5th. And, as the saying goes, "If it weren't so sad, it'd make you laugh".
What was it Senator Obama said about "people holding onto their beliefs" when times get bad? 
(Okay, maybe he didn't say it that well). The following piece is a typically dumb but predictable American response to a problem over which we all actually do have some control, at least if people bother to vote when they're not praying and "home-schooling" their kids on the evils of science and evolution, and not drilling for oil in Alaska and off our country's west coast. (Photo --- As much as I like Obama, I think Senator Clinton is out ahead of him with her call for a "tax vacation" for gasoline-buyers, but only as long as the oil companies use some of their record profits to make-up the shortfall, and she makes solid proposals for long-term relief at the pump ... Which Obama has not yet done).
FYI, the French Press Agency (AFP), which carried this piece, was the only "western" press agency which kept a bureau in Hanoi throughout the entire Vietnam War (both the ones against the French and the US, both of which they won for various reasons not important here and now. However, President Lyndon Baines Johnson's own Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara, and that is his real middle name, has written that the potential for large amounts of oil in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam's east coast was one of the reasons US troops were kept there for so long --- Sound familiar?). For AFP's so-called "intransigence" and "support to the enemy," most all American media, print and electronic, still do not carry their reports; today, thanks to the Internet, we all have access to it. But as a 13-year old volunteer at WBAI radio, the Pacifica Radio station in NYC, I learned that WBAI was the only radio or TV station in the country which then subscribed to the AFP; the station's News Director, Paul Fisher, understood French, the language used on AFP's teletype machine ... This was in 1967. No computers yet.
And just by the way (or, "not for nothing" as my Italian friends in Rhode Island say), oil hit $120 a barrel today, "another record day," just seven weeks before Memorial Day weekend and the Indy 500, the two portents of the traditional "start of America's summer driving season". (Photo --- NY TIMES photo of a gas pump in Gorda, located on California's Central Coast, taken over a month ago; prices ranged from $5.19 to $5.39 a gallon).
Anyway, without any more fanfare nor my interruptions, here is the piece, entitled: "Tired of Paying Through the Nose, Americans Try Praying at the Pump," written by Karin Zeitvogel and distributed worldwide by AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE.
At a Shell gas station in Washington, Rocky Twyman and an unusual group of activists were mad as hell about soaring fuel prices.
"Last week, this station was 3.51 dollars. Now it's practically 3.60. So it's gone up nine cents in one week," Twyman said as he pumped five dollars' worth of gas into his thirsty American car.
"Someone's making a lot of money and it's really, really wrong," added Twyman, who founded the Prayer
at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven't. (Photo --- Recent pump prices at a Shell gas station near Palm Springs, CA; the range is from $3.85 to $4.05).
The half-dozen activists -- Twyman, a former Miss Washington DC, the owner of a small construction company and two volunteers at a local soup kitchen -- joined hands, bowed their heads and intoned a heartfelt prayer. "Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices," Twyman said to a chorus of "amens."
"Prayer is the answer to every problem in life... We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high," Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days.
"Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world," he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, "We Shall Overcome".
"We'll have lower gas prices, we'll have lower gas prices..." they sang.
At the weekend, Twyman had led a group of around 200 people in prayer at pumps in San Francisco, where gas is touching the four-dollars-a-gallon mark.
On Thursday, US lawmakers and experts at a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill painted a grim picture of how Americans are being hammered by record fuel costs and the steepest food price spikes in 17 years.
To read the entire "Prayer at the Pump" story, simply click anywhere on this line.
Also, the LOS ANGELES TIMES ran a somewhat frightening piece today on Chinese businesses finding "bargains" in the US ... Click on this line to read that piece. Doesn't seem "connected" to the "Prayer at the Pump" story at first, but in reality ... at some level, aren't they all?
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