A cow's tongue is dry and rough, and to finally stand close to a cow after passing thousands on a drive through, say, Wisconsin or Nebraska is a humbling experience. Their girth is enormous. You wonder how long it would take to eat one.

On top of their heads is a bony knob, singing out for touch. They don't care for petting, however. They know their purpose. Hold out a handful of hay and their tongues stretch out like elephant trunks, curling around their bounty and sending them back to work. Their bodies are assembly lines.

A step forward and they could do you harm, but they don't. If they had any sense they'd save themselves from the slaughterhouse and rise up tank-tons of ribeye and flank and sparerib and trample our fattened souls into detritus. Good fertilizer for the grass.

Go visit your county fair. It's a cheap date—free parking, corn on the cob, shiny tractors you can touch. The games are easy and food trailers open a few flaps to lapse sleazy with trans-fat, refined sugar and artificial colors. Corn dogs cooked by ethanol. Machine guns spitting bb's. Goldfish counting their circles in little bowls, dreaming of death, praying for toilets instead of cats.

The goods of rural America, through some perverse algorithms of the global economy, are made in China. I bought a camouflage cap brandished with an American flag and eagle's head, gold bars and, in case you don't get it, the initials U.S.A. God bless America, it only set me back five bucks.

A man in the grandstand wore a camouflaged shirt that read, "Ha! Now you can't see me!" Self-awareness grows clumpy and mottled at the county fair. You hear it in the winking country songs, a ritual of covers. In the beer tent the band plays AC/DC and the smoke singes lazy morals.

The meager midway blinks nonsense, girls hunching their shoulders over doughy breasts, girls wearing too much eyeliner, girls punking out to look different, all looking the same, guys like dogs in panting pursuit hoping for a lick and a nuzzle and far too many getting some. Babies bloom in the night.

We came for the cars, though. Four score were tugged in on trailers, lined up in rustbucket dreams of NASCAR fame only to be penned in like cattle and pitted against one another. Old models, graffiti-tagged, the sad castaways of our fickle ad-fueled vanity dreams.

Dreams of escape, rolling through foreign landscapes trying to outrun something you can't, the skies cloudy with family and burdens, holding on to those weights of your own invention because the heavens are much too scary, only to end up in Postcard Pretty, Scared Shitless, USA. These dreams are too much to stand. Isn't there someone to ease the load for a short while?

And when it's all over, when our apocalyptic fantasies rest fulfilled with the oink-moo-bray of a lone wheezing engine, the people waddle off under an umbrella of fireworks, pinks and oranges trying hard to blot out the stars in hopes of matching the throbbing metropolis an hour to the north.

She rolls through stop stop signs: a blonde, her bobblehead balanced perfectly on a crane-like neck, its tendons visible under a fabric of bronze skin. A lean phone spoons her right ear as she talks, her neck steady as she gives only the slightest glance to her left and her right.

In contrast is her vehicle: a black SUV, boxy like a hearse, shoulder pads and a football helmet on a child. Her arms and legs are narrow piping to control the dials and switches: step on the gas, change the station, answer the phone. It occurs to me the future is now, a populace of disembodied brains. In magazine ads hairless, fatless, uniformly tan figures are scaffolding for technological efficiency.

Car commercials are the loveliest: scenery and sunlight, the curve of road through Eden-like swaths of the American West. But the plastic is too thick. It obscures the view. The glass is tinted. The sky turns grim. The air is filtered. There's no scent. We drive to work, to eat, to friends. We are flies bottled up in jars.

On another street trundles a canary Hummer, fat and flashy, medallions of chrome hanging from its grill like rapper's gold. The driver is the past: thick hairy arms, thighs touching, bacteria sweltering in the folds of his skin. He is armored from the outside world, a child wrapped tight in a blanket of air-conditioning.

A BMW driver dreams a utopia of performance, Ayn-Rand order. His car is black, white, silver, a regiment in a Riefenstahl clip, precision blitzing down Western Avenue past rusted-out wrecks weighted by scrap plucked from alleyways.

Who are these men—dumpster divers, three abreast the front seat, windows rolled down, elbows hanging out? They are alchemists, touching the earth, embracing the rust and the rot, turning garbage into gold.

There's been plenty of puzzlement and laughter from bloggers and other assorted Bush-bashers at White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's mention that our fair leader was reading Albert Camus's existentialist novel The Stranger while on vacation at his Crawford Ranch.

A lot of people have cited the book's difficulty as fair reason why Bush could not have possibly read the novel. My first answer to that logic was that anyone can read a book; understanding it is the problem. I was assigned an English translation of The Stranger in high school and though I whipped through it fairly quickly, I couldn't tell you much about it at the time, and probably less today.

It wasn't until I received a forwarded email from my good friend Cris in Omaha, however, that Snow's pronouncement of Bush as a born-again literate finally made sense. Apparently the following has been making the rounds in the inboxes of the sweet God-fearing folk of the heartland:

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger...he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home... not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush.

My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked... and NEVER asked to leave

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures. His name?....

We just call him, "TV."

**Note: This should be required reading for every household in America!**

He has a younger sister now. We call her "Computer."

Indeed! Lovely computer!

You see, Tony Snow was being coy with the liberal media. It wasn't Camus's Stranger Bush was reading, it was an email Jeb sent him. And all this talk was a coded message to the few loyal followers out there huddling together like French soldiers in the trenches of the Culture War! Of course!

It's the season of cicadas, a cacophony of chirps ringing like jingle bells from the treetops. Let's do it again goes Curtis Mayfield from the peanut-odor ash tree. Here I am, come and take me sings Al Green on the sweet maple.

Flies warm themselves on my sun-slathered pinebone porch every morning. The old bricks of my building grow hot and by eight the flies are warm enough to hit hot dog shit. It takes all day for them to devour it, rising, falling, fucking in their bounty.

Yellow jackets pick apart vomit dollops dropped like gifts from God out of the open mouths of drunks. Tequila and rice: sedentary maggots. But their cousin bumblebees still seek out flowers, driving like union men from site to site, collecting their quarry from the open mouths of morning glories saying ahhhhh to Dr. Sunshine.

I watched a flock of sparrows hunt in a hot sunny meadow near the lake. They fell like fighter jets, a horror to the insects, slicing the air up in hairpin turns, bullet beaks snapping one life after another off the face of the earth.

The crickets claim the night, one offering his applause and a thousand joining in, knocking knees and elbows, raising the dead dark from its slumber with a jigjag melody of rabid sex songs. Meanwhile, through the soil and across kitchen floors solitary, quiet beings trundle past—pillbugs, ladybugs, cockroaches, earwigs—too preoccupied to pay them any mind.

And by now most of the fireflies have found dates. Only a few lonely stragglers signal their desperate flares in the dim light of dusk.

Some never made it to the sex act. They were dashed like paint across windshields or captured by soft small hands, forced to contemplate the unfathomable conundrum of glass, a pickle jar world tapped and shaken like a quake, each desperate flare igniting a little dimmer than the last.

I stumbled across a terrific passage illustrating my feelings on the plague of optimism leaking from the current Republican establishment ever since the Reagan revolution. Business writer Jim Collins describes his meeting with Admiral and Vietnam War prisoner Jim Stockdale:

I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Whether those in the White House have hearts is up for debate.