Fella could get downright morose watching the US go in the tank, thanks to our buds on the Bushite bench. Fella could start thinking real hard about emigration. Or political mayhem. Even the odd assassination.
Fella needs to get a life, take a real look at this torture nonsense, and all the other bullshit GW and company have given us in the past almost six years. Fact is, it's politics. And politics is ugly, always has been, always will be. Let's not get all teary about the US' past: we've been hip-deep in way bad shit over and over again, starting with the amazing level of mutual sliming that took place among our founding fathers --- read McCullough on John Adam --- continuing through the regimes of some very nasty pieces of work in the 19th and 20th centuries. We're just starting the 21st extra bad, which maybe means it truly is renewal time.
I'm not willing to bet that this latest travesty will get much past its infancy. It's just TOO far out there, makes Japanese internment look like cub scout stuff. We keep yelling that DC has lost touch with reality, and I'm reasonably confident that's true: the House Dems who voted FOR the bill simply haven't figured out that their voters back home aren't on that page anymore. As for the Republicans, well, what can you way about pond scum. Solution is budhydarma's (sp?): YELL LOUDER!
What this is, maybe, is an 'Oh FUCK!' moment. Counting Clinton's hissyfit earlier this week, that's two in pretty close succession. The only time people stop playing politics as usual is when it becomes blindingly obvious that it doesn't work anymore, that the folks across the aisle are just too fucking evil to compromise with, that it's better to bust the machine than to slap on more baling wire and chewing gum. Gee, Harry, ya think we're there yet?
I have to admit, it's scary for me to see this kind of stumbling toward totalitarianism: I cut my historian's teeth on Hannah Arendt, and got a couple of degrees in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, not to mention spending a couple years in the Soviet Union before it transmogrified itself into just another place where people kill each other for money. The old SU had a fair amount to recommend itself, to be absolutely honest: didn't see a lot of crime, or much extraordinary poverty (just the ordinary variety, which affected everybody, pretty much). But, man, it's way peculiar when people, friends, insist on taking the electrical outlets apart in your room, looking for microphones, before they'll have a drink with you; and that was during glasnost. Just imagine what a picnic your common-or-garden-variety bugger could have with all the electronic baggage we carry around nowadays.
But this is going nowhere in particular. I'm stuck in London, where I'm well and truly unable to do shit about anything. Someone, a 19th century Brit PM, I think, once said: 'Few things really matter, and nothing matters very much'. I don't entirely buy into that, but, nevertheless, I think we all need to take some comfort in the fact that American democracy has always been self-correcting, and that America, while it has done at least its fair share of shitty things, has fairly consistently come clean eventually. Another quotation, which has been a bit overused lately but is apt: 'American can always be counted on to do the right thing...once it has exhausted all of the alternatives.' Every time Bush pulls another atrocity out of his capacious ass, we get closer to the barricades. I'll be there when the time comes. How about you?