I Permit You to Hope

Okay, let’s just face it. 2009 hasn’t started off very well. We’ve got layoffs and bombings and earthquakes and shootings and fires, inept Presidents that won’t go away, a cavernous echo-chamber where the national coffers used to be, and a serious shit sandwich in the Middle East. The economy continues to crumble, and you can pretty much set your watch to breaking political scandals. You might be a little discouraged by all this. You might be thinking, ‘We had a good run, America,’ before you go fortify your house with sandbags and barbed wire and shoot any poor bastard who breaches the perimeter.

But there is a glimmer of hope that all this can be turned around, and that glimmer came toward the end of 2008.

No, not the election of Barack Obama.

That hope came from none other than David Hasselhoff. My whole life, I have held the belief that no person can recover from a drunken inability to eat a hamburger properly and the public humiliation that follows. A taco, sure. Who hasn’t screwed up eating tacos? But a hamburger? Never. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s what I always believed. Until now. David Hasselhoff, beloved of the German people, former star of Baywatch, made just such a recovery before the end of 2008 when he sang the national anthem at a college football bowl game in Las Vegas. And hence, our cause for hope. If that hairy-chested beast can recover his public persona and be half the man the Germans think he is, then we have hope too.

Just think of 2008 as this:


This could be 2009:

Do we all feel better now? So come out of your fallout shelters and remove the ammo from your Kalashnikovs, take that gas pipe out of your mouth and tell your neighbor to step back from the ledge –- because maybe things won't be so bad.

Or maybe they will be. Maybe the Las Vegas Bowl just couldn't get anybody else. I hadn't thought of that.