As horrible as most news reporting has become, (CNN is like a never-ending SNL skit), the non-stop barrage of on-the-scene disaster reporting from every angle, including relentless interviews with victims, relatives of victims, acquaintances of neighbors of relatives of victims, and smart-phone-wielding “eye witness” reporters, is secondarily challenged by the “spin cycle” aftermath, seeking cause, culpability and retribution.

Oklahoma, a state known for its highly active tornado season, and Moore, a city, at least once  previously devastated by cyclonic destruction, have chosen to protect their children from killer tornadoes by lying on top of them on the floor while the principal shouts, “In god’s name, go away!”  Maybe not as effective as a safe room or storm cellar, but these things, “usually don’t happen during school hours”…so how coud you argue with their methodology?

Cool shots of the I-5 bridge collapse over the Skagit River, don’t you think?  Even cooler that the usually well-traveled crossing, (70,000 cars per day), had only three vehicles on it when a truck bumped an abutment causing the “functionally obsolete”, (a real designation by the NTSB given to structures not-yet-bad-enough-to-be-repaired-or-condemned), span to crumble, plunging two vehicles and three people into the frigid water below.  Since no life was lost, not even a serious injury, the follow-up talking points will not prompt a serious re-visit to the idea of making the necessary investment in rebuilding our infrastructure…but…“this bridge failure is going to mess up a lot of people’s Memorial Day plans.”

Remember the Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed fourteen people, (twelve of them first responders), because Texas promotes itself as a place where businesses can thrive without all of that ‘boooshit regalashun’?  The regulation, (observed by real states), would have limited the amount of highly unstable ammonium nitrate to four tons, (I think this means that it’s not a safe idea to have more than four tons of this shit in any one place).  At least twenty-eight tons exploded during the fire and another one hundred tons was sitting in a rail car, (did not explode so was barely mentioned), just outside the facility.  And the Lone Star response…Rick Perry continues his ‘Come to Texas…We’ll Leave You the Fuck Alone!’ campaign.

We’re not even six months past the weeks of heart-wrenching images depicting the grief and disbelief of the shootings in Newtown, CT.  For so many of us the outrage of our violent nature and the irrational gun-toters adoration of inappropriate weaponry and their interpreted Constitutional right to possess and use it, has already been discounted by legislators who have, once again, been bullied into doing nothing.

There seems to be an acceleration in the frequency and enormity of disasters raining down on us.  This could be biblical, but I’m going with InterNet connectability and those ever-present “eye reporters” feeding twenty-four-hour news disseminators.  Suddenly we’re informed of cosmic showers of planet-killer asteroids hurtling at us on a daily basis?  Someone said that lobal warming may actually be real.  There are colonies of disgusting looking things in our eyebrows.  Liberace was gay!  And the “spin cycle” addressing these potential disasters, (well, maybe not the Liberace one), is shorter than the one on my Maytag.