Rome Fell—Then the Food Got Better 

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. What else could he do? This is not about Afghanistan or Vietnam. It's about a country that some think is starting to look like Rome. A few years ago, Wilson and the Smart Bomb Band made a sojourn to Italy. No, they didn't shoot a man name Gray and take his wife to Italy, a la Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind." They got an invite from a group putting on a Funk Festival at the Piazza Campo De' Fiori, but that's not important.

Upon return, Wilson reported that when they got to Rome the place was full of—wait for it—Romans. Imagine that. This despite the fact that Rome fell in 476 A.D. Wilson noted that it's almost impossible to find bad food in Italy—unless you go to a place where tourists eat—and the coda alla vaccinara is to die for.

Ancient Rome conquered peoples from Judea to Spain—and seems to have been more successful at it than the U.S. Say what you will, but the Vietnamese food in this country got a lot better after our retreat from Southeast Asia in 1975 when a lot of Vietnamese came here. Smart Bomb's food critic, Maple Bacon, says we can anticipate an invasion of great Afghan food in the near future. Like Rome, the U.S. could fall, but the food isn't going anywhere. Bon appetit!

America the Stupid
"Oh beautiful for spacious skies and spacious minds of grain, where we don't trust the government and vaccines are a pain. America, America, no brotherhood for thee and no masks or social distancing from sea to shining sea..."

And that opens another fantastic football season here in the greatest country in the world, where we've had enough of the pandemic. So never mind all them people worried about super-spreader events or that kids can get sick and spread Covid. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said it best when it comes to the Delta variant: "Do this or do that or do what the Legislature says or not. Real leadership means leaving it to someone else—like the school board or the county commission—but just don't make a stink or be, like, too uppity when you say you're vaccinated and better than people who prefer to get their medical advice from QAnon."

Why should people have to wear masks at the hardware store or a football game? Yes, the hospital ICUs are full again and now a lot more young people are dying, but there's really nothing much we can do about it. Everybody has to die someday and when it's your time, well, that's the way it goes. Or like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to say: Don't let science and medicine steal your freedom. Screw it, let's party!

The Lone Star Rape
Don't mess with Texas, where every life is sacred until birth. In Texas, you're free to carry a firearm without license or training. In 2019, there were 3,683 gun-related deaths in the Lone Star State. In 2018, 73% of veteran suicides in Texas were by firearms; that year, 74 women were killed by male partners in Texas—59% by guns; in 2019, 32 children ages 0-17 died from unintentional shootings there.

Freedom grows from the barrel of a gun. But in the Lone Star State freedom ends where a woman's uterus begins. The new law says that even in cases of rape or incest, a woman cannot get a safe, legal abortion after six weeks or pregnancy—a time when most women do not know if they're pregnant. According to FBI crime statistics, Texas has a rate of 55.2 rapes and sexual assaults per 100,000 people—15th in the nation.

Although a Texas court has shielded Texas abortion clinics for now, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block it. And the anti-abortion law leaves enforcement up to anyone who wishes to sue a provider or even someone who drives a woman to a clinic. Well, what good are guns if you can't be a vigilante? In Texas, a good Christian place, there is freedom from masks and vaccinations and, not least, freedom from empathy.

Postscript—OK, that's a wrap for another history-making week here at Smart Bomb, where the staff knows one thing for sure, and that's that we don't know nothin' for sure. Here's a New York Times headline to illustrate it: "Rupert Murdoch's Australia News Outlets to Ease Their Climate Denial." What?

Australia's been burning up for years and now Murdoch senses that maybe the public is catching on? "It could be a breakthrough," writes Damien Cave, "that provides political cover for Australia's conservative government to end its refusal to set ambitious emission targets. If sustained, it could also put pressure on Fox News and other Murdoch-owned outlets in the United States and Britain that have been hostile to climate science."

What's really needed is for corporate America to defund Fox News, writes Diane McWhorter in The Daily Beast: "Fox has jacked up partisanship into a primetime dystopia that should give sponsors pause. Do they really want the babies in their disposable-diaper commercials to share airtime with a Texas politician comparing Seattle to a Middle Eastern town taken over by ISIS?"

Murdoch and his hate mongers care nothing for this country or the planet, so long as they can profit. Boycott Fox sponsors. Pass it on.

Well Wilson, it's time to welcome our new immigrants, the Afghans, who are fleeing the Taliban after our 20-year war. They need a new home and it won't be easy for them. So warm up the band and let's show them the good side of America:

If you smile at me I will understand
'Cause that is something
Everybody everywhere does in the same language
I can see by your coat, my friend you're from the other side
There's just one thing I got to know
Can you tell me please who won?

Wooden ships on the water very free and easy
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be
Silver people on the shoreline let us be
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy

Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cries
Stare as all human feelings die
We are leaving, you don't need us

Go take your sister then by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don't need us

And it's a fair wind
Blowin' warm out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I'll set a course and go
"Wooden Ships"—Crosby, Stills & Nash