Rafting the river of American life

One of my favorite bloggers is Will Divide, who writes the blog Huck and Jim. Ostensibly a big-shouldered Chicagoan (one of the whimsical things about blogs is that you can visualize the blog-writers any way you like), Will posts infrequently but everything he posts is well worth reading.

At the moment, he's guiding his circle of readers through the great Mark Twain's great story, Huckleberry Finn, posting a synopsis of a new chapter each Sunday along with his take on the deeper meaning Twain wove between the lines regarding America, slavery, bigotry, poverty, etc. The result is fascinating, educational and intriguing, and Will invites further discussion in comments. And here I thought Huckleberry Finn was mostly a story written for children. Heh.

But what has really drawn me to Will's blog over the last several years are his astute, witty and deadly-spot-on posts about America's ongoing political situation, how it's affecting our lives and where it's taking us. Here's a bit of his latest, in which Will characterizes the Republicanism of the last 30 years as delightfully entertaining for that party's members – and then points out that they haven't realized yet that the fun is over:

"I'm not sure when the entertainment began to drain out of GOP land. I think the bubble broke apart in several places: Mission Accomplished, the Katrina flyover, the Terry Schiavo soap opera (interesting that all three featured that little war criminal in a plane going somewhere). But drain out it did, which is not to say that the parched inhabitants of the Repub desert isle are not still thirsty for it. Hell, their lives once depended on it and now it is mostly all gone."

Go read the rest. Huck and Jim will hook you like a Mississippi catfish.