The Kerry Hangover

If the unthinkable occurs on November 2, if the seemingly insurmountable is surmounted, if somehow the conservative nightmare in which we currently find ourselves subsides and George W. Bush is rightfully denied reelection, despite the demands of both Karl Rove and God almighty, the streets of the world will erupt with joyous celebration. As if a great curse had been lifted from us, we shall breathe a collective sigh of relief and give homage to providence for this wonderfully unexpected gift. Enemies in regions of strife will take a well-deserved break from their cyclical hatred to toast to the cleansing of a great stain on history's bed sheet. Flowers and candies will bandy about in a manner heretofore resigned to the seedy dream world of Richard Pearle's dementia. Laughter and cheers may drown out the gunfire, if only for a split second, and it will be, in posterity's eye, a moment of some redemption for America to right itself where it had gone so wrong. But after all of the celebration has drained from our bodies, and all of the optimism has poured from our lungs, we shall wake regrettably to find John Kerry the new leader of the free world. We shall as one wake in a fit of nausea, internal dry heaves and mind numbing perplexity, and bemoan the wretched elixir from which we too liberally drank.

Anticlimax on a short time delay.

For as Bush's tyranny over intellectualism, science, ethics and linguistics comes to a necessary end, so with it our illusions that he was an anomaly misrepresentative of our current polity. Bush has symbolized to most in the world all that is dangerously combustible in the combination of dumb arrogance and unequivocal power. But make no mistake, Bush is far from some atavistic political mutation, he is what he has always been - a man devoted to the ideological causes of his frighteningly broad base. A base that has withstood the contradiction of every age of human enlightenment through time immemorial, only to repackage itself anew and find refuge amongst the spiritually feeble. The fuckedupedness of this country has been borne not from the deranged mind of one pseudo-hillbilly, but from a severe mental illness, conservative fanaticism, that pervades large chunks of the world's populace. Bush is but a tree in the forest of Rovism, and the moment we see him as anything greater than that we only do ourselves and progress a great disservice. Bush the man has never been the real problem. He is merely a grotesque symptom of it - and to my dismay, so too I believe is Kerry.

If we are so fortunate as to be exorcised of our Boy-Idiot, we will have to face to stark realization that the forces that have trotted Kerry out before us as our presumptive savior have no intention of letting go their real stranglehold on our democracy, and that most of the things that Bush has stood so shamefully for over the last four years will remain the law of the land. Don't get me wrong, Kerry is a vastly better choice than Bush and anyone voting in a swing state should take close notice of those differences, but to pretend that Kerry will foster in a new age of political reformation is a chimera. In fact, I feel quite confident that, no matter who stumbles through the quadrennial recitation of bullshit in front of the decrepit Rehnquist on January 20, 2005, the most important issues facing us today will be as unresolved as ever by 2008 - we will still be deeply entrenched in Iraq, 40 plus million Americans (if not more) will still be without viable healthcare, gays and lesbians will still be deemed second class citizens, vast swaths of unwitting and innocent Arab-Americans will still be scooped up and tossed in jail under the indiscriminate aim of our national security, the tax burden will still weigh heaviest on those least able to shoulder it and millions of lives will continue to be destroyed under the pretense of a winnable drug war - now so hopelessly lost in the widely-cast shadow of that new fantastical and perpetual war. Kerry has so far no answer, not that he has really looked, to these problems. It seems to me that he hasn't been a definitive voice for progressive change since 1971. No, I fear that the best we can hope for from this JFK-lite is political stagnation, a clotting of the bleeding. Bush and his ilk represent a disturbingly regressive trend in this country, one that Kerry (based on what I have seen so far) is in no position to reverse. I can only hope that he can act as a stopgap until such time as someone whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to that trend can rise to the forefront. Or maybe Kerry will shock the world. Maybe the Kerry hangover won't last out the four years and he will become the liberal that the right has long mislabeled him. But I doubt it.