no noo! [what the zen baby says when you try to take away her ignored, uneaten food]
Wednesday 3 November 2004 | I like a cookie
I didn’t think anything could make me laugh today, but the Editor emailed me:
Thanks to so many of you who came out last night to support The Hip Hop Voter Project’s Election Night Party. It was great to have such a large crowd of my favorite people on such an intense night. Particularly given that we all may end up living under a bridge together sharing stale bread crusts and hiding from religious fanatics who want to beat us with sticks.
Then, Flipper from New York (he of Lexington Avenue) opined (and I quote at length):
The country has voted to drive this train off the cliff, so let’s do it right. Kerry wanted to moderate the speed and try to get some friends on board the imperial express. Cheney/Bush want to keep the throttle wide open and keep shovelling cash into the firebox. Yippie! We’re all gonna die!
A disappointed Kerry supporter this morning offered the opinion that “people voted for me, me, me—they just want a tax cut and be damned with what happens tomorrow or the next day.” I’m not convinced it’s so simple. My impression is that the country voted true to its philosophical outlook, and against its immediate material interests. The heartland is mostly in the backwash of globalization. The big corporate money, jobs, lifestyles are in the urban centers, on the coasts. But the heartland voted for the emotional relief of symbolic strikes against imaginary enemies: gays, abortionists, bible-banning liberals, etc.
The coasts and urban areas voted to give up some of the stolen booty handed to them by the Bushies in the hope that the sacrifice would be compensated by a more humane and rational approach to national priorities. So one can argue that each side voted its conscience, rather than its pocketbook. Unfortunately, a conscience troubled by imaginary enemies is the conscience of a mental patient, and the basic definition of mental incapacity is a tendency toward self-destructive behavior.
At the end of the Weimar Republic, the German electorate voted for the National Socialists, signing the death warrant for democracy in exchange for a dream of national greatness. As Gunter Grass put it in The Tin Drum: “There once was a credulous people, who believed in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus turned out to be the gas man.”
Corporate talking heads are saying the election has clarified nothing, that the country is still “deeply divided.” Can we not rather say that the election has clarified everything, and that the United States has chosen vigorous and enthusiastic militarism and imperialism over anemic, managerial, two-faced imperialism?
Homeland uber alles!
And I respond—yeah baby, we’re going to plow that train off the cliff like there’s no tomorrow. We’re going to set fire to benjamins, laughing maniacally and wiping blow off our noses; we’re going to grab the strippers’ asses even if it means we get thrown out of the club, we’re going to pick fights with people fifty times our size and insult their mothers and their sisters. “We’re all gonna die” sounds about right, whether it’s at the hands of our fossil-fuel addiction or some seriously pissed-off fundamentalists, of whatever persuasion.
Why why why can’t the Dems come up with a candidate who has a pulse?! Where oh where be the likes of Slick Willie?! Where is it written that the alternative to a can’t-keep-his-britches-on, sweetie-pie-deal-making Arkansas governor is the Ironing Board, a spineless, lackluster statesman with bad hair and a crappy grip on foreign policy?! (Although he’s all over that global warming shit.) And, perhaps most importantly, how can I emigrate before the Muslim-Christian Armageddon begins?!
And I think Flipper’s absolutely right about the symbolic strikes: N. and I saw Bush supporters in Albuquerque on Monday with huge bold signs reading “DEFEND MARRIAGE” and “PROTECT LIFE,” while the Kerry guys timidly waved tiny litle effete posters saying Bush Is Scary, Vote for Kerry. That’s all we got? Against the pathological midwestern terror of queers and witches? Bush is scary?! Goddammit, the Dems deserve to lose. We frickin’ deserve it.
I felt the same frustration yesterday trying to vote on the local bond issues—no, I don’t want to vote Yes on some pathetic tokenistic gesture toward water use—I want hard-core conservation incentives, dammit! I’d so much rather be screwed by a frank sadist than by a trustifarian sensitive-new-age dickwad any day of the week.
God save us; because He’s apparently the only one whose advice Dubya will take. Did somebody say “theocracy”?
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