Georgia On My Mind

I don’t watch much television - even sporting events that I once loved to witness in the comfort of my own living room are mostly listened to over the radio now. At six o’clock every weekday, Anna and me watch Dr. House, which is basically a soap opera about a cranky bastard of a doctor who diagnoses every patient with lupus, while enjoying pornography on his laptop computer in-between abusing his employees and flagrantly taunting his superiors. All of this while addicted to painkillers. And he never has to shave or wear a lab coat. This Dr. House guy is certainly a role model; every young man should aspire to practice medicine if this is the end result of eight years of medical school.

And all of the girls want to bed him, imagine that!

Also, time permitting, episodes of South Park will never fail to grab my attention. South Park is an animated show where Canadian alien children live in a fictitious Colorado town called, coincidentally, South Park. A young boy named Kenny gets killed in almost every episode, mostly from some horribly gruesome tussle with really bad luck. The other children, who as Canadians are much smarter than their American parents, solve all sorts of problems that confound humanity in the United States of America. Since this is Mexico, and the audio is in English with Spanish subtitles, the constant potty-mouth bantering is not only entertaining, but also highly educational to young Mexican children at five o’clock in the afternoon.

I have instructed Anna to not ever miss an episode except in case of some unforeseen emergency.

In the course of a day, I do my best to avoid news broadcasts, I tend to listen to music or sports because both are wonderfully trivial and inconsequential in the scheme of things. However, I did hear something about Russia invading Georgia, so even though I tried to ignore it I became curious as to why Russia would be interested in Georgia at all. Was it the peaches? Perhaps some unrequited angst over the lopsided medal count at the 1996 Olympic Games? I became curious, and when I become curious I often resort to geography to attempt to gain a better understanding.



Now, supposedly, the area that is the point of contention between Georgia and Russia is a county or region called South Ossetia. I have looked all over the map, and I can’t find South Ossetia, North Ossetia, or anything even close to something called Ossetia. Apparently, there are a lot of Russians there and they want for that region to belong to Russia. This makes sense, I suppose, because as the saying goes, you can take the ethnic people out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the ethnic people. But holy crap, Georgia is thousands of miles away from Russia, I mean, how did these Russians get to Georgia in the first place? And how did they get troops in there so fast?

Where is our goddamned Homeland Security Department when we need them?

Then I found something out, and I blame it all on the communists. See, when I was a kid, Europe basically consisted of England, France, and Spain. Russia sort of owned everything else, and nobody counted China because they were also communist bastards and everyone thought they were probably secretly scheming with the Russians anyway. And then, somewhere in there, and I was probably either drunk or going through a divorce when it happened, Russia decided that communism wasn’t so great after all. So, the Russians decided to spin off their lesser holdings. All sorts of countries were suddenly IPO’s, and they all got brand new names.

Apparently, one particular region without much of an imagination decided that Georgia sounded pretty cool.

So then I thought that Russia’s invasion made sense in a way, that it was nothing more than a hostile takeover. I remember when AT&T was forced to break up, and the politicians were all slapping each other on the back over it, but now they’ve bought back their own spin-offs. From a financial aspect, it makes sense, so I began to satisfy myself with that explanation, until I heard more unwanted news about it all being because of ethnicity and so on. Once again, I decided to turn to geography for the answer.



Okay, now I totally understand, the problem is that the map of the republic of Georgia is in Russian! I’m sure that Bush and Cheney are all over this. Once this map is translated into English, then the Russians will have to leave, and in return the Georgian people will certainly hand over their natural resources as a token of thanks. And then they’ll embrace American democracy. And so on.

Now I’ll sleep well, and look forward to more Dr. House and South Park now that I don’t have to worry about Georgia anymore.