== Praise Jesus, the end of an era = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Fidel Castro slumps away, Bush races to history's dungheap, and 13 million TVs prepare to die. Are you ready?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/02/22/notes022208.DTL&nl=fix

You know what we don't really get enough of in American culture? Change.

No, not the bland politicalspeak Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton brand of broad sloganeering bumper-sticker change, the kind where part of your naive perky innocent unicorns-in-the-sky self really wants to believe it's all going to be hopeful and good and radically different, but yet you kind of know, deep down, when you peel back the masks and the rhetoric and the spin, that when all is said and done, pretty much the exact same jackals and demons and CEOs will run the bleak global circus, same as it ever was.

No, I mean the kind of deep, cathartic change that can only come through, say, death, or explosive upheaval, or mind-shattering discovery (Jesus was a woman!), or, you know, "the end of an era."

Fidel Castro retired. That was, apparently, a big one, albeit a bit anticlimactic, given how Castro's end didn't come as everyone expected, by way of him suddenly keeling over and dying in a crumpled heap of smoky rage with a cigar in one hand and a bottle of Havana Club in the other, wearing a bright red Adidas tracksuit and stabbing his finger at the sky as he called for a people's revolution as not a single one of his handlers had the nerve to tell him it was no longer 1968 and the revolution had already passed by and oh, by the way, the revolution actually was televised, but the ratings stunk and hence it quickly replaced by all-new episodes of "The Bachelorette." ...