Electoral Rage

Well, it's official, Bush wins, mankind loses. Let there be no confusion, no recounts, no arguments about tainted ballots or dirty tricks, no question in our collective mind, George W. Bush has a mandate, albeit slight, from the people of this rapidly deteriorating nation to be our President for four more ominous years. As I write these painful words, a dark cloud descends upon all that is righteous and good in this once promising land. My lower intestines wrench like spaghetti noodles wrapping around a slowly turning spork. Pure, chaotic, voiceless rage. Balled fists of white knuckles make typing even more brutishly spastic than usual and panic colleagues with respect for company property. Fleeting moments of it-will-be-ok-ish thoughts are violently stomped out by a reverberating sense of impending doom. That little reddish-black dot in my peripheral vision is flashing and growing larger, as if counting down to something even more cataclysmic - presumably an end to which Bush is the frightful means.

The inevitable question jostles around in my head, eliminating capacity for other thought: How can people living in relatively similar conditions as I do vote this wickedly moronic dickhead back into office? How? Seriously, how? Have they no access to books, no knowledge of history, no innate sense of how atavistically, regressive this country is becoming? Have they no fundamental fucking decency? To those of us burdened by rationality, the transparency of Bush's incompetence, his violent inappropriateness to lead even the tiniest subsection of people, his pure, crystallized, intolerable stupidity makes it all the more difficult to understand. I want to grab those bulky, clueless red states by the sides of their empty metaphorical heads and shake the shit out of them, somehow try to force them to grasp the basic principles of humanity. I want to wake them from their long, thoughtless, Wal-martian stupor. But it's no use, confusion is but a mere symptom, ignorance is their disease. Rational argument can no sooner prevail here than with a newborn child, only a vast amount of education will do, and that requires patience I can no longer afford.

But for all the frustration and disappointment, I am firmly convinced that we, the anti-Bush crowd, have truly only ourselves to blame for this first election of George W. Bush. For all of the posturing on the left, all of the reluctant concessions made, all of the vacuous, self-fulfilled prophetic talk of electability, we have nothing, less than nothing, to show for our decision to proffer John Kerry for President. That decision was the single biggest mistake we could have made to ensure the continued empowerment of the Bushies. Herein lies the painful, irritating rub. We tried to run a watered-down conservative against a real one, and the real thing will always win that battle. We brought a knife to an ideological gunfight. What's worse, we did more than just lose an election. We got so caught up in winning the election, we forgot to be on the right side of the issues. Once Kerry got his first whiff of the Presidential poontang so to speak, the blood rushed out of his head and scoring became the only matter of consequence. We tolerated it, even apologized for it, because we vainly assumed that the goal of beating the idiot trumped all other considerations. There, in the seedy underbelly of justifiable politik, is where we really lost, not on November 2. We were focused on the wrong Goddamn enemy, playing grab-ass with the clueless spokesperson in the lobby while the real assholes liquored-up and sodomized our nation in the dirty backroom of their faux-wood-paneled hunting lodge. The problem is jack-ass Presidents don't change America, ideas, for good or ill, do, and we chose the guy that seemed the most devoid of any - and why, because he could pull 10 or 15 loyal Vietnam vets out of his ass at the drop of a television camera. I mean seriously, did I miss something. Was the idea that George W. Bush wasn't good enough at starting wars? I don't give a flying fuck if Kerry can excavate the rotting toothless corpse of General Washington for a posthumous endorsement, I would have just settled for someone who fundamentally disagreed with Bush. Sure, we would have lost the election anyways, but we might have won the argument. Maybe it's just me, but I think it better to lose big with the right message than lose small with the wrong one.

So what now? Solutions appear as elusive as elected office to progressives. Am I to simply fester for four more years, which in fanatic conservative years will feel more like 30? Should I move to Europe or Canada? How can I continue to live in George Bush's America, when our politics are diametrically opposed, when I disdain everything he stands for? He is adamantly against thought and reason, I am for both; he's unimpressed with literacy, I think its elemental to a good Presidency; he believes that a vengeful God will send dirty homosexual men to burn in fiery Hell for their indiscreetly-tight pants, I lament God's wretched non-existence; he thinks cluster bombing a populated Iraqi city is a viable liberation strategy, I find it to be the saddest of ironies; he thinks that claiming to be peaceful makes one so, I think not starting wars of aggression does. My only hope at this point is that the pendulum gets high enough to the right that the return swing is strong enough to get this country back on track, that is if it doesn't get caught in the muddy trough that is the current democratic party.