Holy Fucking Shit.
the whole wide world as of 1.20.09
A friend sent me the following IM earlier this evening:
“We are going to have a new President tomorrow”
Whoa. It’s true. But this “Obama taking office” thing and all of the hoopla surrounding it, coupled with the bizarre and pathetic limp to the finish line by the Bush Administration really threw me off. Don’t even get me started about the hero airline pilot and the landing on the Hudson because that was just aces, man. What a scene stealer.
The past few months of Obama-mania was underscored by 6 months of shocking economic destruction upheaval and that was preceded by well over a year of intense Presidential political campaigning and that, of course, dovetailed with the previous 7 years of a stultifying, polarizing, war-mongering, money-grubbing, fear-fueling, reason-crushing, occult-worshipping, mother-fucking evil excuse for an ideology of leadership that we have all come to know and love, laugh at, pity, shit on: The Permanent Republican Majority. So you can see how there’s been so much to ponder that I kind of forgot that Obama was actually, for really realz, taking office tomorrow.
Our young country has been through so much in the last 8 years. From September 11, 2001 until now our country has faced unthinkable difficulties beginning with an unprovoked act of war committed on our own soil by religious zealots of the Islamic persuasion. We did not deserve to be attacked and we were completely within our rights to defend ourselves. The world rallied behind America with emotional and steadfast support.
It seemed like our safety and security was in capable hands for the modern historical equivalent of about .25 seconds and then somebody whispered something about “Iraq” on Meet The Press and the whole thing went ass over teakettle. Then, oddly enough, we told the world to go fuck themselves. This approach to doing things seemed to go off without so much as a squeak of complaint from our terrified citizenry during the test marketing phase, so our country’s elected majority (along with some dudes that nobody had ever heard of before, nor since: the neo-cons!!) moved forward with a new and improved military industrial complex that only benefitted by telling the world to fuck themselves whenever and wherever possible and anyone who didn’t agree, especially other Americans, was a treasonous, unpatriotic pussy.
I think the sentiment really crystallized for me when I noticed that we were coming together as one nation, tethered only by our broken hearts and the filthy, tattered American flags that we proudly jammed into every crevice that our vehicles would yield just a few months before. And then we knocked the patriotic ball right out of the park when we righteously cast aspersions on the cuisine of other countries as a way of showing just how in solidarity we were in our feelings that they should seriously fuck off.
comedy = tragedy + time.
In light of how our hard times began, it strains my ability to make the comprehension leap, to truly “get it”, how we’ve drifted so far in the wrong direction that the most frightening dilemmas we Americans face now, perhaps the most challenging and complicated in our nation’s history, have been caused by our own people. People in charge of things that regular people aren’t supposed to worry about, like who’s regulating the hedge funds and shit like that. Greedy, selfish people disguised as protectors of the American taxpayer and enemies of “big government”, worshipping like fat pigs at the trough of the infallible free markets, invoking the name of Reagan ad nauseum in order to hoodwink the working and wealthy classes alike. How sadly ironic to finally control all branches of government, having made a Faustian bargain with the religious right, only to disprove every single one of your precious tenets so convincingly and dramatically; by bringing American free-market capitalism to its knees as quickly and effectively as a group of monkeys in possession of a giant stick to use against their despised owner when he turns his back man who has just paid a 2 bit whore 20 bucks and instructed her to get on her knees. I don’t think Alan Greenspan, Grover Norquist and their various adherents would mean to inspire such a crass analogy, but the American people did not mean to inspire an ass-fucking of such historically cruel proportions, did we?
Before I veer wildly off topic, I need to point out that during this most recent period, our country elected the superb Barack Obama to be the 44th President of The United States Of America. He’s brilliant, he’s electrifying, he’s sexy, he’s accomplished, he seems to be completely engaged by his life, his gorgeous family is the epitome of the American Dream, he arguably (not really arguable, i’m just trying to be deferential to differing points of view) ran the single most impressive + disciplined political campaign that anyone’s ever seen. He is, in a word, the greatest man who ever lived in the history of this Earth. For now.
So while I thought I was paying real close attention, I did space out on the one important fact: We are going to have a new President tomorrow. Wow. Good for us.
xok
