28 | February | 2012 | Existential Ennui

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An election you dummy! Doncha watch the news?

The Willard and The Ragin’ Rickster are pitted in the col0sseum, trident versus sword and net, circling, muscles rippling, abs rock hard, sizing up, crowds hushed then roaring, calling for blood, craning necks to see the death-blow.

Okay, actually it’s two buffoons seeing which one can feed more red meat to the TeaMob®.

So, let’s look at the fair state of MICHIGAN, my place of birth, and one of two states shaped as a body part. Hint: Never trust a state shaped as a body part. The mitten will slap ya silly and the penis will leave you deeply unsatisfied.

Okay. Michigan is very Frenchie, which drives the Neo-Cons wild cuz they love to bash the French. Michigan is actually Mishigamaa the Ojibwa word for the land and it means, . . .”large water.” Which has nothing to do with peeing, I assure you.

It has over 64,000 lakes which makes it way more lakey than that land of 10,oo0 puny lakes. In fact, a Michigander (Goose land?) is never more than six nautical miles from dipping his toe into some body of water. Rubber boots are big as you might guess.

It is fairly weird in that it has two pieces to it, and they don’t touch, unless you count an artificial bridge,The Mackinac, that connects them. The Upper, Yooper land, is really only Michigan’s by default. Wisconsin drew a line in the sand, and told everyone on the north side to stay on their own side, and Michigan, being a generous and compassionate state, took the waif Upper, and let it share the name. It’s true. I read it on a Burma Shave ad somewhere in El Paso.

The Mackinac is not Mack en Ac as you might suspect, but is actually Mack en awe. And you will be in awe crossing that bugger, which I have more times than I would like to remember. It’s freakin’ long, and scary and, yes one or two poor souls a year drive their vehicles clean off it and take an unexpected dive into lake Superior, which is a lake with attitude, as you can tell by the name.

Now before the French came, there were a whole lot of tribes who lived peaceably in the area, which they called the Confederation of Three Fires. Course, the French being the French, they changed all the names of everybody. For instance they changed the Wyandot to the Huron, you know, cause Y N DOT sounds a lot like Hurrrr ON. Anyway, the French got on good with the locals, and the Catholic missionaries were busy convertin’ away.

Finally they, the French that is, started organizing things in the South, which mainly consisted of puttin’ French names to everything, which remain to this day. Which is a whole ‘nother story about how good old “Mericans” can utterly rape the hell out of a language once they get ahold of it. Examples are Livernois which would be “Leveer-nuaw” but is called today Liver-noise”, and “Beau-bi-ah” which is today called “Bo-be-an”.

Well, if you recall there used to be a lot of wars back then, and the French lost one, and Michigan became English. So Michigan, land of forests and Native Americans (who hadn’t yet been told they were Native Americans), went from being French snooty to English snooty. After the Revolutionary War, Michigan, no doubt because of all that snootiness up their noses, couldn’t see where the boundary lines were, and considered themselves part of Canada. This was not all sorted out until 1847, which tells you that, well the folks there are a bit directionally impaired.

Not a lot of people lived there until the Erie Canal opened up and people flocked in to take the great water slide run all the way down the St. Lawrence.

The state is insufferably connected to the Republican party, and would be a big fat Red were it not for the auto industry and unions. Unions = Democrats in case you don’t know. All Michigan school children learn this from the first grade onward. Dick and Jane’s parents were members of the UAW. Spot was an Independent.

While there are lots of universities and colleges, there are only two U of M and the real great one MSU. I went to one of them, but I’m very neutral on which one is best.

Course Michigan is known for cars. Lots of cars. All kinds of cars. Fords, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Chryslers. Henry Ford developed the “moving assembly line” and created the new mental illness “bored to death” along with it. Ford paid his workers more money than any workers before them, but not because he was kind, he just wanted them to buy his cars.

Tons of people flocked into Michigan to become bored to death in the factories, tightening a bolt all day. This caused some African-Americans to start singing the blues, which became a place called Motown. You can still see the house up on Grand Avenue, which is NOT Grand at all by most standards. You can go in and see the microphone used by Smokey Robinson and The Supremes if you want.

Grand Rapids has long claimed to be the furniture manufacturing hub of the world. No one has ever been bored enough to drive that far to find out if it’s true.

Mildew is the leading cause of death, as you might expect.

In 1846, Michigan became the first state in the Union to abolish the death penalty. I wrote a hundred page paper on that for law school which has never been published, but I will give a private reading if requested.

A whole lot of other things could be said, but hey, they aren’t very interesting to me. It’s too cold in winter, too muggy in the summer, too buggy, and too cloudy.

Oh, and by the way. They never pick the candidate who wins anything nationally. So don’t worry your head whether The Willard or The Ragin’ Rickter wins in Michigan. They chose George Wallace and Jesse Jackson in primaries too.