So, why the return? A change of heart? Har har; fat chance. Why would I? Again, no excuse, which you again didn’t want anyway. Have you given up reading this yet? If so, then you didn’t read that question. Are you asleep?
With so much appalling shit happening in the world, far too many instances for me to begin listing, why should anyone give a royal rat’s fuck what happens in the Divided States? And yet, there’s still a part of me that mumbles, in a sort of snarling whine, “What the fuck ever happened to the Golden Age promised us by the Great Brown Hope?” And I’m not by any means the only one who is embittered and disillusioned, not only at his inability to achieve anything substantial of what he promised, but at his perverse ability to do things that nobody who voted for him wants. Cries of “turncoat” and “Bush lite” are growing in volume, and more and more people are shaking their heads and resigning themselves to another four years of essentially business as usual.
And yet, interestingly enough, one of his most vigorous apologists is the Rude Pundit. I find this interesting because Rude is usually eager to disembowel, castrate, and commit endless colorful atrocities on almost anybody and everybody with fervent, pornographic, scatological glee—usually Republicans and right-wingers but also occasionally Dummy-crats whom he thinks are betraying the cause. And yet he responds to the disillusioned critics of O-man with the essential message: Back off and give him a chance. He’s only been in office five months, and before he can build very much positive, he has to clean up the godawful pile of shit he’s been handed that it took the Bush Crime Family eight years to create. Since I’m not clever at embedding links, I’ll quote directly from Rude’s “Barack Obama is not afraid of you and he will kick your ass,” 6/23:
We’re impatient, yes, yes, we are. The deluded who thought they were getting beautiful Barack to ride in on a giant stallion and slay the big, bad Bush machine are impatient. The realists who knew they were getting a really damn smart, slightly left of center guy in Obama and not an avenging liberal, they’re impatient, too.Well, perhaps “impatient” is a kinder way of putting it than “embittered and disillusioned,” and Rude himself mentions some of the things Obama has failed to do that he promised, or did that we think he shouldn’t have. And as I said earlier about Mark Udall (4 Oct 08, “Preaching to the choir”), I suppose Obama must be given credit for trying to work bipartisanly with the Right, even though they adamantly refuse to cooperate with him and it basically means hopelessly compromising all the principles on the basis of which he was elected. And yet, despite Rude’s call for patience and all attempts to give O-man credit where credit is due, I’m still embittered and disillusioned and feeling deeply betrayed, and my instincts for anarchy are once more vindicated. Any and all change that occurs will be for the worse, and I look forward to the imminent collapse of civilization and the global ecosystem with dour apathy.
. . . it’s gonna take a fuck of a lot of work to get us back to zero, to the way things were before George W. Bush came in and pissed on our beds, raped our dogs, tied us up, set the house on fire, and left without calling 911. And then, once it’s back to zero, we can talk about how it gets better. Doesn’t make any of us less impatient and it doesn’t excuse some of the shit Obama’s doing (like continuing to argue the Bush administration side on cases left over from it), but we gotta recognize that the circumstances are: “We’re fucked – can we be un-fucked?”
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of mind-numbing opiates
Once more, another Codependence Day has come and gone, and I’m reminded that all the fireworks that everybody loves so much are actually stylized warfare. “The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” was penned by Francis Scott Keyhole during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812, and was not about fireworks. Granted, adding the salts of strontium, calcium, barium, sodium, magnesium, and copper to the gunpowder does make for prettier blasts than your basic improvised explosive device, but the principle is the same. This year I didn’t attend any of the public celebrations but sat inside the house in Longmont that I was taking care of for relatives. But I could clearly hear all the explosions not far away, and I had the eerie feeling of almost being able to imagine I was in a house in Kirkuk, Iraq, with a real war raging outside. There were times during the Reign of Terror (2001–08) when I was almost in favor of another revolution, except that without the wisdom of people like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin, Paine, et al., we’d probably royally fuck up another one, like the French and the Russians did with theirs; and the fascist thugs in control at the time probably wouldn’t have hesitated to machine-gun us in the streets.
I did not fly or wave any flags for the big day; if I were to fly any flag, it would be the Earth flag. At the place where I was working about twenty years ago, someone started taking donations to buy a flagpole to put out front, and I told them I’d contribute if they’d fly the Earth flag above the United States flag, since the Earth had obvious precedence over the U.S., having existed very nicely without it for several billion years, whereas the U.S. self-evidently could not exist at all without the Earth. The look I got suggested they probably thought I was some kind of Commie radical. (Nope, just a hippie tree-hugger.)
