On this day, we were born. On this day Albert Gore conceded the 2000 election to George W. Bush. He had little choice, the Five on the Supreme Court issued an unsigned opinion that assassinated the Constitution. The country accepted it, and Gore accepted it. And the world had little choice.
This day will not be marked by parades, it will not be filled with rousing celebrations of gusto, on the right. They did not truly come to the kind of unfettered power they craved until 9/11 become our Reichstag Fire, the excuse to give all power to a party which had, at best, slender support.
[BREAKING: As if we didn't need a reminder of how things work, liberal talk show host Arnie Arnesen is being driven off NH airwaves by right wing interests.]
And on the left it is a day that most people will prefer to forget, because it marks the moment where the old system, with its fissures and fractures, fell to a sleek new machine. It was a new era filled with a ghastly shimmering blue glare, and stone faced men and women bellowing out talking points with absolute assurance. Few knew what a "neo-conservative" was, and most would have scratched their heads, why have new conservatives when America had just elected an old style conservative?
For myself I mark this day as national failure day. It is the day when Americans should look at themselves, and measure their actions, asking what they had not done for their country, but asked their country to do for them. From top to bottom, from left to right, Bush is a mark of a people who are willing to bargain permanent liberty for temporary security. There is no group beyond censure - from those who were too rigid on the far left, to those who were too flaccid in the center - everyone must accept that in a Democracy, all are responsible for the results.
But this year is different from last year, and much different from the year before. It is this year where the corrosive corruption that holds up this Reactionary Republic that has replaced the old Liberal Democracy is now visible to the light. People knew the facts, what they are now seeing are the details. Abramoff, Coingate, ARMPAC, FEBAR, Plamegate, shadow company corruption, no bid reconstruction, K Street Project, gas price gouging, Iraq cold cash corruption - more real scandals than Clinton suffered in his whole presidency. Each one of which larger than all of the past scandals put together. Teapot Dome truly was a tempest in a teapot compared to Baghdad Bush and his war without honour in a decade with out a name.
The best way to do penance is to set right what was made wrong, to change course and act anew. Too many have not learned this lesson, too many at the top of the Democratic Party seem to think that power is merely something to be grabbed from Bush, and then abused, if not as much, then not enough less. They want to repeat the mistakes of the past, confident that they can take one more long slug from the bottle of massive defense budgets and corporate welfare, and still walk out as Democrats. Those who want to defense build up our way to fiscal sanity are trying to drink their way to sobriety.
This is not what the country wants, even if it thinks, temporarily, that it is the way to get what it wants. The country wants, even if it cannot quite do it yet, to be weaned from its addictions, to lose its illusions and to be clean and sober. "You are only as sick as your secrets", and America is very sick indeed. But like most alcoholics, they won't stop until they "hit bottom", until the pavement comes crashing up to meet them in the face, and there is no room left for maneuver. America is sick, America is tired, but it isn't quite yet sick and tired of being sick and tired.
So this is the day to take stock, and ask yourself what your own bad habits are. Because to restore America, we are all going to have to lose bad habits, bad habits built up by decades of success of the old liberalism, but as lethal now as they were useful then. It is a day to look ourselves in the eye, and accept that there are burdens to bear, and prices to pay, friends to find, enemies to oppose, in order to advance the cause of liberty. It is not enough to oppose Bush's war without honour in a decade without a name. We must understand that the world after Bush will be filled with unfree states and unfree peoples, that America has mortgaged its future to energy which is locked beneath unfree lands. That we cannot be free, as long as we are slaves to our addictions, and servants to our distractions.
The bottom has been reached, and now there is the long slow climb up into the light. But we will not reach it alone. Instead, every day, the throng that marches towards a better America must become larger. We must pull people out of the stands, and into the stream, from being spectators, to being the spectacle. Every day, and at every chance, pass the word. In groups or alone, in writing or in speech, in words and in deeds. Tell people that a better America is possible, and that it is time to say "Enough is Enough".
[My CD is now available at Tower Records. One reader says " I do not have the language to describe music, that is a
gap in my experience, but while I have played it at the office, I have
been effectively ordred by several of my cubemates to put the disc on
repeat."]