I was just wondering, if you are "damned if you do and damned if you don't," is there a point at which you contract this exposition to simply "damned?"

At the portal to hell where I work, one woman was berated for not doing something which didn't matter anyway, the next year a guy in the same job was berated for doing what the woman had failed to do the year before. Neither action nor inaction has any consequence, but our employer always gets this way upon returning from an annual trip. I pointed out that we have no set policy on the pointless matter, and that we simply needed to spell out what we want done about this nothing issue. For a week we pretended to have an absurd policy, and this year the woman in that job was fired after the annual trip. I suspect she may have messed up the non-existant issue one way or the other.

Howard Dean was supposed to take a chill pill. But Dukakis was supposed to go Oprah about the death penalty if Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered.

Who makes up these pre-fab non-issue "perceptions," these court-ordered ways-you-have-to-be, and why does anyone swallow them? A very bright friend of mine couldn't get loose of the Dukakis thing--"well, then he should've been just so appalled by the question, he should've reacted more!" No, it's not an appalling question, it goes straight to the issue. But it was also a good straight answer--he seemed unsurprised, not caught off guard, but as if he'd thought about what it meant to people, already, and he held his position, which happens to be the sane one. I believe that incident may illustrate my political ideal.
   No, the point of the question was to try to rattle him, and it didn't work, so he was somehow wrong anyway, because that was the idea anyway.

   I'm not sure where this stuff comes from, but I know it smells exactly like junior high school social politics, the odor that arises from unformed minds gathering together. When the butt-heads decide to bait a picked-on kid, even if he doesn't fall for it it's still played off as an error, one way or another. And kids who are sheep eat it up.

   People are messed up. Damned.