The Last WordIssue #488 May 2015

Have a funky funky isthmus...You didnt believe me when I said I was going to the roadmeet in Madison, Wisconsin. Im not a mind

reader, but I know these things. Cool people like me can figure it out.Butsince Im such a groovy guyI did go Wisconsining,

and it was a downright spectacle. I left on the morning of Friday,April 17. I boarded a Megabus coach in Cincinnati, and thingsimmediately went hilarious! As the bus was parked in Cincinnati,the driver expelled a group of 3 women from the bus because itappeared as if they were all trying to board using the same ticket.When they refused to leave, the driver declared, Get off the bus orIm gonna do something I dont want to have to do! But the driverwho resembled the cartoon driver Megabus uses as its mascotrelented when he discovered that Megabus mistakenly assigned the3 women the same ticket number.

The bus traveled to the University of Cincinnati and thence to Megabuss favorite rest stopin St. Paul,Indianaand then onto the Indianapolis stop. I arrived on time in Chicago, where I had to schedule a longlayover. This presented me with a perfect opportunity to do a Chicago walking tour. The usual roadtrip hilarityoccurred there. When I stopped by a McDonalds to use the tinkletorium, I noticed that someone had peed all overthe restroom floor. Soon after, I saw Occupy picketing a different McDonalds. One of the Occupy groups wasOccupy Naperville, hailing from the Illinois city where Big League Chew bubble gum was first test-marketed. Igave the Occupy demonstrators a thumbs-up in support. Later, as I was walking along Clark Street, the pungentbouquet of a silent-but-deadly bunker blast hovered in the air.

The Megabus to Madison left on time, but while the bus was idling in a traffic jam, someone on the buscracked another silent-but-deadly.

While I was in transit, I checked my itinerary and discovered something very disturbing. I had planned ontaking a city bus from the Megabus stop near the university in Madison over to my hotel on the citys northeastedge. But I noticed Google Maps had printed out the wrong time for that bus trip. A sense of worry began todescend upon me. This doomsday feeling tightened at the Megabus stop on Madisons south side because thedriver on this leg of the trip didnt know how to restart the bus after stopping it. He had to call the Megabus peepsand ask themsquandering many precious minutes.

I wasnt too late getting to the university bus stop, but it was dark, and I had to get to my motel. Instead ofrelying on the bad bus information Google gave me, I spotted a bicycle rental station. I hopped aboard a hulkingbikey and began speeding northeast in the darkness. I hoped to turn in the bike a bit further down the road andwalk the rest of the way. But I noticed that as I got further from downtown, I could find no other stations. Infrustration, I biked several miles all the way back into townall the way to the State Capitol that looms over thecity. I had to ask some locals where the nearest bike station was. I turned in the bike and took a bus after all.

Luckily, Madisons bus system was more than just the bare-bones service that TANK provides. Even lateat night, I was able to efficiently get to the motel. Madisons bus system was so extensive that the completeschedules filled a booklet as big as the Campbell County phone book. I used that to plan the next days bus usageagain ditching Googles bad data.

Oh yes, the hotel. The inn was a disaster. It reeked of paint, had no hot water whatsoever, and wasinfested with ants. The swimming pool was of course closedwhich should have earned the hotel a grogantherein. The motel was a poking bruise on an otherwise fine city.

On Saturday, I took a bus 10 miles across town to the roadmeet itself. What indeed is a roadmeet? Itssomething cool people do. Thats what. The meet drew over 20 people. After the luncheon, we explored the city.Madison is a rather compact city. It has very few suburbs, so folks arent forced to drive 15 miles out of town justto buy a pair of underpants or a sheet of thumbtacksunlike some cities we know of. Go more than a few milesfrom the Wisconsin State Capitol in most directions, and you find yourself in a large lake or a cornfield.

In keeping with our noble roadmeet traditions, bunker blasts were experienced during the meet. When wereturned to the restaurant and waited outside the establishment, a loud-and-proud air biscuit was heard. Everybodypretended not to notice this unmistakable double-barreled burst of flatulence. Afterward, we toured a cluster of

radio stations. As we were crowded together in a room, someone released a silent-but-deadly. It was silent, but itwas deadly. The stink of this hovering bunkeroo was so overpowering that I went out in the hall. I still wasnt ableto fully escape the aroma.

The blab predicted a rainout for Sunday. But the weather was dry throughout my lengthy walking tour ofMadison. This trek was tiring. I walked from the hotel on the northeast all the way to the universitywith manydetours, such as Occupy Madison Village. The Tea Party had supported a petition to prevent the village fromopening. And trust me, the Tea Party did support that petition. Id wager that the people behind the petition woulddeny that Team Tyranny ever backed their efforts, because they sounded like the crybabies on Usenet whoclaimed to be liberal but were actually culled from the pages of the Moron Majority. But Occupy prevailed againstthe Evil Empire. After all, its Madison.

I had also planned on detouring to Madisons zoo. But I had no energy to go that far, so I huffed andpuffed into the public library to refill my thermos. The libe was open on Sunday, because the Tea Party hasntsued them to force them to cut service.

The Megabus stop at the universityconsisted of 2 shelters. After I plunked down atone of the shelters, I heard a loud-and-proudbackdoor breeze looming my way from theother shelter. The bus to Chicago arrived ontime, and it got to Chicago on time as well. Butduring that route, my stomach began to churn.When I returned from the restroom after aNumber One and sat back down, a Code Vimmediately rose from the depths of mydigestive tract. All other passengers within 5feet narrowly avoided disaster. So I had to rushback down to the johndola and finish the job.

The Chicago bus stop had no shelter, so I waited in the pouring rain and darkness for an hour for the busto Cincinnati. During this layover, I saw a Jared the Subway Guy look-alike boarding another bus. After my nextbus got moving, a taxi blocked the street and caused a delay. The bus driver frantically pounded the horn, but thetaxi refused to budge. Another delay was to be had when the friendly driver stayed at the Indianapolis stop toolong because he didnt know we were out of the Central Time Zone. See, theres another reason why we should bemoved to Central Time. Wall Street wosted nearly an hour by force-feeding us Eastern Time and confusing thedriver.

It was the middle of the night, and I was half-asleep, so the depth of these delays didnt sink in. Still, wewerent tremendously late getting to Cincinnati on Monday morningat least compared to Greyhounds infamousdebacle after the St. Louis roadmeet last year.

Based on my trusty common cold timetable, it is generally believed that I contracted a cold while I wasstumbling into the library in Madison in the throes of dehydration and weakened immunity. The followingTuesday evening, I was watching CHiPs at home when the telltale signs of a cold began to predominate. Iresorted to my time-tested cure: pouring hydrogen peroxide in the ears. This significantly shortened this creepingillness, and only my precious Wednesday was wholly destructed, as this infection quickly skipped to its endstages.

But the trip did yield 77 Roads Scholarin photos for you to flip through like a deck of cardsthat is, ifyoure the type who analyzes and ponders each card in a deck...

http://www.bunkerblast.info/roadpics/mad15a.htmlhttp://www.bunkerblast.info/roadpics/mad15b.htmlhttp://www.bunkerblast.info/roadpics/mad15c.htmlhttp://www.bunkerblast.info/roadpics/mad15d.html

No museums left behindEvery former President since Herbert Hoover has an official museum under the auspices of the National

Archives and Records Administration, and Ive now been to all of them except the ones on the West Coast. Afterthe Wisconsin roadmeet and the resulting boogly-wooglums, I goed on a fact-finding mission to the presidentialmuseums of Arkansas and Texas. This trip lasted from April 30 to May 6thus latening this ish.

Nobody ripped any bunker blasts on this trip, nor did anyone plop anything. Quite unfortunate indeed. Agroup of rowdy bikers broke the dishes at an Austin restaurant, but thats about it. However, I did visit 4presidential museums.

Of the 11 such museums Ive visited, only 2 felt like theyre from an alternate universe: the ones for theBushes, both of which I visited on this trip. The George Bush Presidential Museumwhich commemorates theelder Bushs failed legacywas interesting, but every bit as biased as you might expect from something that hasto do with the Bush royal family. Most presidential museums highlight positive achievements but at least try to beobjective here and there. In BushWorld, however, objectivity is a four-letter word.

This museum tried to paint Bush as a champion of racial equalityeven though he vetoed the CivilRights Act of 1990. Plus, much of the facility dealt with the 1991 Gulf War and tried to portray it as a successworthy of nothing less than sheer praise. While Lyndon Johnsons excellent museum was fairly objective aboutthe Vietnam War and even explained the origin of the expression another Vietnam, I couldnt find anything inBushs museum that seemed to cast doubt on the Gulf Wars supposed wisdom. Kind of like The Media.

Bushs museum also seemed to suggest that his reign was a period of economic prosperitythoughnothing could be further from the truth. Granted, Bill Clintons amazing museum was guilty of the same thing,though by now Ive kind of gotten used to the fable about the .com bubble somehow prolonging my library gigby 3 months. I think the difference here is that nobody believed Bushs hogwash in the first place, but hisapologists keep pumping up his legacy anyway.

The Bush museum does have a fascinating sculpture that includes a fragment of the Berlin Wall withSting lyrics spraypainted on it...

Unfortunately, however, the museum incorrectly makes it appear as if Bush had something to do with thecollapse of the feared Iron Curtain, even though Republican administrations did more to delay this inevitableevent than anyone else did.

But the amount of revisionism and grandstanding at that museum was nothing compared to that at themuseum commemorating the disastrous misrule of Bushs despicable son. The George W. Bush PresidentialCenter is an outright propaganda machine. I hesitate to even call it a museum.

I knew this facility wasnt fully grounded in reality when I entered and saw the exhibit that said GeorgeWashington played baseball. (It reminded me of the person on Facebook who said Abraham Lincoln was shotwhile seeing a movie.) It only got sillier from there.

For instance, look at this exhibit...

I dont know if thats supposed to function like a See n Sayor perhaps a Sit n Spin or a Close n Playbut it appears to be designed to promote Bushs costly tax relief experiment that only benefited Big Businessand the rich. They even copied the factory symbol from one of the fonts on my word processor.

Heres a nearby exhibit with the same format...

What tax cut? When did I ever get a tax cut under Bush? Its as I said above: The Bush get with itprogram of tax relief was for the 1%not the 99%.

Both of those exhibits seemed to be designed for children, very gullible adults, and very gullible childrenwho will someday be very gullible adults. Its one thing if the Bush thought police propagandizes only togrownups, but its worse to fill childrens heads with this roo gas. So it figures that I saw at least 3 or 4 schoolgroups on a field trip at this facility. I dont remember seeing school groups at any other presidential museumseven on weekdays during these 11-month-long school years we have now. Schools will never balk at a chance toexpose impressionable young minds to right-wing nonsense. It was like that 35 years ago, and its even worsenow. Naturally, at least one or two of the school groups was decked out in think-alike uniforms as they marched inlockstep through the museum. Conformity like this was of course always demanded by the Bush regime.

This touchscreen exhibit has the same general message as the other displays...

Watch President Bushs tax cuts build prosperity, it says. What prosperity? Bush turned a mererecession into the longest depression in Americas history. Or is this like some of the other exhibits, which toldhow great things would be if some of Bushs proposalssuch as his flawed ideas on Social Securityhadntbeen scuttled by us big, mean libs?

This illuminated map at the museum highlights Bushs failed war on terror...

Libya was a nuclear superpower??? Who knew???This rather interesting framed exhibit features a pistol seized from Saddam Husseinafter Bush failed to

find Saddams fabled weapons of mass destruction...

But if you really want your psyche to be numbed by the far-right mind-bending and absolute stupidity of

the Bush years, theres this laughable, wordy display...

Seventh grade civics and discredited Bushaganda all on one breathtaking sign! Who do they think foistedthe Citizens United ruling upon us? It wasnt Judge Wapner.

I like to think that I visited the Bushes museums so you wont have to. While all 13 presidentialmuseums in this system are overseen by the National Archives and Records Administrationan independentgovernment agencythe George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush museums share their operations with TexasA&M and Southern Methodist University, respectively. Presidential museums should educate, but even the one-sided Bush museums were fascinating to visit. Despite my unending (though wholly justifiable) disgust for theregimes that they honor, I genuinely enjoyed seeing these facilitiesbut I have a strong enough philosophicalfoundation not to be indoctrinated by them.

Apparently, not everybody thinks they were even that great. When I was in the restroom at the George W.Bush museum, I noticed dried urine was already caking the toilet seat, even though this was early in the day.Maybe a youngster from one of the school groups peed on the seat because he already knew of the failures ofBushism. Smart kid!

Also at this museum, I saw a Nancy Kerrigan look-alike, which was kind of amusing too.President Obamas museum wont open for another 5 years, but I wouldnt mind seeing itif I live that

long, which became a lot less likely largely because of the policies of the Bush dynasty.All in all, this was a good roadtripand very likely my last for the foreseeable future. I dont have the

energy or financial stability to travel like I otherwise would, and 2 roadtrips within a couple weeks has taken areal physical toll.

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