Wallow In Chaos, And Laugh
Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist, November 3, 2004

A Bush-leaning outcome and one enormous bitter pill--and you without your vodka

Oh dear God please not again.

Oh dear God please don't let it be all convoluted and depressing and messy and stupid and please don't let it all embarrass us on an international level all over again even more than it already has and even more than it already is and even more than we've endured lo these past four debilitating and soul-crushing years. Hello? Please? Is it already too late?

Why yes, yes it is.

And lo and behold, it's apparently another completely tortuous and entirely knotted presidential election, ... ...

Which is, well, simply staggering. Mind-blowing. Odd. Gut-wrenching. Colon-knotting. Eyeball-gouging. And so on.

You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you're an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don't normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex and maybe a few luminous transcendental deities that look remarkably like Jenna Jameson.

It simply boggles the mind: We've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and still much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant.

Inexplicable?

Not really. People want to believe. They want to trust their leaders, even against all screaming, neon-lit evidence and stack upon stack of flagrant, impeachment-grade lie. They simply cannot allow that Dubya might really be an utter boob and that they are being treated like an abused, beaten housewife who keeps coming back for more, insisting her drunk husband didn't mean it, that she probably had it coming, that the cuts and bruises and blood and broken bones are all for her own good.

This election's apparent outcome, this heartbreaking proof of a nation split more deeply and decisively than ever,

--it simply reinforces the feeling among much of the educated populace: It is a weirdly embarrassing time to be an American.
It is jarring and oddly shattering and makes you rethink what it really means to be a part of this country.

The answer: It doesn't mean much at all. Not really. Not anymore.
...
...

Here's the thing: For tens of millions of us, it is simply unconscionable that we could possibly be led for another four years by a small and spoiled little man who has very little real idea what he's doing and even less of how the hell he got there. It would be funny, in a Adam Sandler, toilet-humored sort of way, were it not so poisonous and depressing. And yet it looks like we're stuck with it, like a shard of glass buried deep in the eye.

And the rest of the world? Well, it can only watch us and shake its collective head and wonder just what the hell is wrong with us, why so many millions of us would even consider re-electing the world's most inept and war-hungry and insanely inarticulate man to four more years of unchecked power, why our much-hyped much-coveted supposedly ultra-superior democratic system is so very deeply blotchy and knotty and spoiled.
...
...

And all signs point to the fact that the GOP steamroller appears to be just too powerful, just too well-oiled and blood soaked and fear inducing to be stopped just yet. After all, the Right has been working on this master plan and building their takeover strategy for about forty years. It's gonna take those of us working for change and progress and raw spiritual juice a little more than one or two to dissolve it away like the cancer it so obviously is.

Apparently, there are lessons yet to be learned. Apparently we must hit some sort of new low between now and 2008, attain some sort of seriously vicious status in the world before we will snap out of it. You think?
... ...

Maybe the best we can hope for, at this ominous and slightly sickening moment, is one hell of a lot more patience.
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 4:04 pm