Those of us old enough to look back a few decades can better appreciate the blessings of today’s Information Age. It doesn’t seem that long ago, really, that we had to make life’s important decisions by observing parents, by reading and studying, by attending church and listening to our Inner Voice. Thankfully, those days are over. Now, through television and other media connections, we have instantaneous access to the beliefs and opinions of movie stars, professional athletes, talk show hosts, celebrity attorneys and politicians who are uniquely gifted to tell us what to think and how to feel. What a relief. We no longer have to waste precious time examining tiresome literature or grappling with moral, cultural and spiritual issues on our own. Luckily, Geraldo and Oprah are there for us.

A day should never pass this earth unless every human soul kneels to give daily thanks to television. As terrorism, pestilence and hatred sweep across the planet, television is there to see it, document it, dissect it, analyze it and finally announce it. Our having to witness this degradation and misery every hour on the hour ordinarily might lead us to mass melancholia, or worse yet, hysteria, were it not for television’s merciful foresight in allowing only beautiful people to deliver the bad news. Or haven’t you noticed? The talking heads, primarily young women, are primarily blond and primarily svelte, with teeth that dazzle and eyes that sparkle. Although they appear to have been recruited from Hugh Hefner’s personnel archives, they surely must be the very top graduates of the top broadcast journalism schools in the land. In the newsroom, at the weather desk, at the sports desk, on the playing field, at the financial desk, at the crime scene and in the courtroom, their honey-tongues and dulcet tones enunciate and articulate so smoothly and so glibly, that we’re dead dog certain they are as endowed mentally as they are physically. And we must admit that beautiful, charismatic people who speak eloquently are smarter, more believable and thus more worthy than, say, homely people. This must be the absolute truth. Otherwise, by now, the National Organization of Women (NOW) would certainly have filed a class-action suit against the broadcast networks for discrimination. By now, Martha Burk would have nailed the entire industry for rejecting ugly women in favor of the self-assured Megyn Kelly and the bevy of her alluring colleagues. Evidently, NOW must have agreed that ugly women do indeed lack the intellect, the speaking skills, the credibility — perhaps even the work ethic — to face the nation. NOW must have recognized that television audiences would never swallow words coming from a fat lady with bad hair. The message seems crystal clear. Ugly people — especially old ugly women — need not apply as talking heads. The networks don’t want you because the people won’t have you. We want Britney Spear look-a-likes. We want hot looking specimens who never miss a syllable, just as we want political candidates with the gift of the gab, because we the people invariably prefer silver tongues to stout brains. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that how the pretty people talk is more important than what the pretty people say. In any event, despite the evidence that beautiful people are superior in every way, some daring entrepreneur should establish a television news network that hires the brainiest, most articulate, but most physically unappealing people on the planet. If you like, call it UGH!TV. Waddya think? If the programming content and substance of this new network were first-rate, wouldn’t we accept second-rate looks? Not a chance. Well, there’s always radio.

We’ve got this war thing all wrong. History has taught us zilch. Interestingly, GW has much in common with a visionary warrior of some repute — one Caesar. By all accounts, Gaius Julius Caesar was a child prodigy. Heroic, charming and beloved by his legions and the people, he also was pragmatic, arrogant, relentless, envied and hated by his rivals. By his own admission, he was God–inspired and consumed by his legacy. JC, like GW, was excoriated as a warmonger. The comparison is striking. In 58 B.C., the most powerful, envied and feared civilization on earth was the Roman Republic, sustained by an invincible military machine. But, you see, Caesar wasn’t willing to keep his troops home on the assumption that barbarians would never march on Rome and use their weapons of mass destruction. His inspectors, spies if you will, reported military build-ups all across Italia, Germania and Gaul (that’s right behind the bladder). Caesar’s strategy was simple and decisive. He traveled north and west and eliminated real and implied threats to Rome with preemptive military action. To his credit, he sent emissaries to certain fortress towns and offered to negotiate peace. And there, any comparison with GW ends. When dictators (Kings) refused to abide by the rule of Roman law, their kingdoms literally were obliterated, wiped squeaky clean. The kingdom’s wealth was confiscated, some of it divvied among the troops and some of it to Caesar’s private stash. The rest went to the Roman Treasury. Get the picture? In barbaric times, war was lucrative. To the victor went the spoils, including slaves, livestock, land, gold and natural resources. Sounds reasonable enough. Get rid of the enemy; take their wealth to reimburse the victor’s human and material loss and cost. My, my, how times have changed. America, by contrast, is the nation of do–gooders. We wage war to protect, not only our own liberty, but also the liberty of peoples the world over. We routinely send our sons and daughters to their deaths, rebuild the lands we conquer, spread the message of freedom and protect the sanctity of native cultures. All the while, we tax our own citizens to care for the vanquished and restore their infrastructures. Of course, that’s what do-gooders do. America helped liberate China so that China one day could kill American troops in Vietnam so that China one day could suck the life out of American manufacturing. America suffered the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, eventually retaliated with the A–Bomb and now the Japanese own half our country. America left thousands of its dead under European soil, liberated millions, created The Marshall Plan to help bring hope, peace and prosperity to the ravaged land and “tore down that Wall,” only to have the French and Germans sneer and jeer at American “aggression” in Iraq. If JC had been here to run the show in Iraq, there would be no Abugrab, no Gitmo and no hearings, because nothing would be living there except vultures — to clean up after the party. Makes a lot of sense, because nobody, but nobody, likes a do–gooder.