"Why do they hate us?"

On the Sunday morning after 9.11, a man came up to me in church and asked the 64,000-thousand dollar question: "Jim, why do they hate us?"

Let me count the ways. How about this? 1) Once again OJ is in the news, a man who really deserves the national spotlight. This time, he's been arrested in Las Vegas (which is #2) for strong arming a pair of jerks who make their living selling sports memorabilia (how about our mad adulation of athletics for #3?). It seems the jock salesmen were marketing things like the suit OJ wore during the infamous trial (#4--the OJ Trial). The reason they were selling such nuttiness is because the celebrity-mad (#5) American public will buy such commodities--not only that but pay big prices for them.

Are we there yet?

But there's more. It seems the two shysters who were selling such precious items as an old OJ suit thoughtfully made a tape recording of the whole event, which was smart, of course, because now the whole world can hear OJ's Tony Soprano-type rant, laced with obscenities (you can hear it on-line somewhere, and let's just make that #6).

But there's more. It seems the two shysters who were selling the "memorabilia" didn't turn that tape over to the cops right away. Strange. Instead, they waited until some media mogul--this time TMZ.com--paid them for it so they (the media outlet) could put it 0n their website and thereby attract millions of loony listeners (that's us again, and I'm calling it #7) who hungrily click their way into madness by trying to hear the blow-by-blow account of the Vegas hotel-room heist, as if hearing that m-f-ing rant is going to be something really special.

Let's make sure we understand this: these two memorabilia salesmen went running off to the law, scared silly by OJ and his mafia-type henchmen, but waited a few days to forward the tape recording of the event so they could sell it to the media. Ain't we got fun.

What am I up to? Nine is me for even writing this. If anybody deserves to simply sink into the primordial ooze without anyone ever being heard from him again, it's OJ. He doesn't deserve the fifteen minutes it's taking for me to post this.

And ten, well, you're not going to like this either, but it's you for reading it.

When it comes to OJ and Paris Hilton, I side with the Islamic radicals. I'll defend freedom, but I hate it excesses--and we've got excesses as huge as Las Vegas casinos. What terrorists don't want--is to be like us. More specificially, they don't want Las Vegas or OJ or Paris Hilton, and I don't blame them.

Freedom, as George W Bush is fond of telling us, is a wonderful ideology. But it ain't perfect, and neither are we.

That's enough. Forever.