On How I Used to Believe that Everyone Just Wanted to Fuck, Eat Cheeseburgers, and Not Get Shot At.

or,

The lunatics are STILL running the asylum.

Someone recently asked me how I was dealing with the fact that the Blue stuffed shirt lost to an Idiot in the Election, again. My response?

By a hybrid car, move to Canada, and learn to speak Arabic. Why? ‘Cause we’re all gonna die.

This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt that I was voting not on the issues, not for the leader of a party whose platform seemed to lean more my way than that of the other guy, not against someone I felt was out of touch, but honestly out of self defense. I was, and am, seriously frightened.

On election night, I sat and watched Pat Buchannon talk about the three “G’s” of voting in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Apparently, they are God, Guns, and Gays. When Tim Russert asked him, “Well those are two positive issues and one negative one, right?”, Buchanon had the same look on his face coyotes must have when they realize they are going to have to chew off one of their own legs to escape a trap. His response, after a pained pause, was “That depends on your point of view.” You could actually see his lips twitching, like his mind was screaming at him to say, “Yes Tim, but the first two G’s are the solution to the third one.” Who ever thought putting that fascist bigot on television was a good idea needs to drown in a urine flavored sea of ratings-profit death when he gets to hell. The two liberal leaning panel members looked ready to rip him apart and eat him alive. During the discussion of the “youth vote” (who didn’t turn out in any greater niumbers than they did 4 years ago, about 17% of the total votes cast again this time around, thanks kids), Buchannon went so far as to say that 18 year old kids who only “started reading the newspaper a year or so ago” shouldn’t be able to cast votes that carried the same weight as everyone else.

Fuck you, jack ass, I’ve been reading the paper since I was seven.

But that is exactly the problem. The nation isn’t polarized Red and Blue. We aren’t evenly split down the middle, pulling as far away from each other as we can, rooting like sports fans at a neutral-site Bowl Game. I see now that Mike was right, in that long raging argument on the back porch that we had. We’re all so smack dab right in the middle, just riding that soft wave of comfortable numbness that requires little or no thinking beyond which channel to watch. The public is just basically stupid. The close nature of the elections indicates exactly what this post title says about us. The truth is, neither side managed to find an honest leader, anyone with gravitas,anyone with honest charisma, anyone with real solutions or bold big ideas, to lead the unwashed masses. They ran the best stuffed shirts they could find. And, cheesburger in hand, ketchup dribbling down the front of our overalls, we picked the easy choice and went back to our reality TV. I swear to God I heard someone say that their kids wanted to watch the election results to, “see who got voted off.” Really.

I guess the people like to get shot at, after all. What terrifies me is that Mike might be right about something else from our little back porch debate (and again, I apologize to the neighbors for all the screaming). We’re all in big fuckin’ trouble. We just greenlighted the damn redneck son of a bitch to shoot at whoever the fuck he wants for the next few years in an effort to keep gas under a buck-fifty a gallon. We just gave him the chance to put somebody on the Supreme Court that could overturn Roe. Get out your coat hangers, ladies. We just put a guy who believes his God is the only Right God back in the highest office in the land, and without stopping to realize that he most likely can’t even spell Qur’an, much less that he’s read any of it. All Presidents are flawed (all people, for that matter) but this guy, I mean, WOW. I’m really scared.