As a Brit my DNA dictates that I am an eccentric. I love the bizarre, the lunatic madness that illuminates dark passages in our time.
Over the last few weeks, Daily Kos has more than satisfied this need to a far greater extent than I could have ever imagined.
So, now a front-page diary says that we choose to have the Democratic Party be displayed as a recumbent donkey, unresponsive to all but a vicious kick in the ass. We chose this six months before one of the most important elections in American history?
It would be pure Monty Python if it weren't for the fact that it seems to leave some not laughing.
For the sake of those in need across the world - get a grip, people.
I think back to those many, many months ago that I joined Daily Kos because I was appalled at what our two countries were perpetuating on the world.
This was the only site in the whole internet of our two nations were people came together in a huge mass of solidarity to express their disgust and, more importantly, their determination to effect change.
Now as I go through the diaries, I see more and more despair, more and more personal agonising on what the blind eye of fate has handed to us as individuals, a despairing and senseless anger that is not directed towards positive goals and a vying by personalities to be the most recommended of the disheartened.
Today's diaries are a litany of further outrage upon outrage that are being perpetuated on the people of our nations. Yet far too many of the responses that are posted are at best cynical and at worst despairing of anything curbing and bringing to account those who are responsible for these deeds.
As each assault against our Constitutional Rights, and our hopes as a people occurs, we should become tougher, more hardened, more steel like in our response. Instead we imitate the aging boxer, reeling punch drunk from the blows, too defeated at the start of the fight to put up even a pretence of a real contest.
And the iconic image that we are to create for the political party to lead us all away from this will be the kicking of a somnolent, reluctant donkey?
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. ....
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
That rough beast whose hour is come is being offered to us in the form of a recumbent donkey, unmovable, impotent, wearied of its burden, insensitive to the urging of those around it. It doesn't slouch towards its goal; it is exhausted, crumpled on the ground. It speaks more of death than of birth; more of the agony of hopelessness than of ambition. Or so we are led to believe is the intended advertisement to promote a book on the future of the Democratic Party. Yet, strangely, the book by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas that has prompted the bizarre desire for such a misconceived advertisement is one of hope. It HAS to be a book of hope if it is to be of worth at such a critical time.
The message of this simple diary? The clock is ticking. November is not that far away. Time to work for a single purpose. It's name is "winning". Let that determination be evident in our hearts by what we write here.
Otherwise, if it were not for the knowledge of all those Kossacks working hard on the ground, I would fear that we are faced with twenty years of stony sleep and a greater nightmare.