Well, a week of grinding deadlines at work does wonders for those post-election blues, I can tell you. Whilst dealing with script-writing duties, and even an unforeseen return to my old gig (all that was missing was a holographic message stating, “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope”), it became very easy to accept that nothing had actually changed, and the previous few months of increasingly rancorous election verbiage had just been a half-remembered nightmare, a bit of undigested potato.
During a bit of downtime, I did attempt to log on to Blogger and make myself look less cavalier about writing in this thing (though at the moment, I’m the only person reading this, so one wonders why…) . Things were a bit messed up, to say the least. I can only assume that the rest of Blogistan was writing in, either conducting their own “What Went Wrong?” post-mortems or crowing that “Jesus Speaks Through the Republicans“. As ever, the only opinion I find worth considering is that of The Rude Pundit, who basically embraces the ugliness coming our way and feels the best response is ugliness of our own.
But here I am in Blogistan, so I feel I should trot out my own blitherings – either that, or exclaim how some musician no one else has ever heard of is either “kEWl” or “teh suck” – though, as usual, all I can do is report on what’s going on inside my head.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so surprised at the outcome, even though surprise should be my response – after all, 51% of the popular vote is by no means a mandate, it’s more like the convicts managing to get in that last touchdown as the finishing gun goes off in The Longest Yard. No, I expected a landslide, a vast tsunami of Right Thought, shocking the neocons and telling them, “No, we’re not going to play this game anymore.”
The reason for that, of course, is that like most people, I hang with my own herd. There are not a whole lot of folks in my circle of friends who claim to be conservative (and those that do still have a lop-sided grin when they speak of “The liberal media”, so they at least know they’re spouting bullshit). On my regular reading list is the aforementioned Rude Pundit and The Smirking Chimp. Oh, yes, I was polarized, and I allowed myself to believe that most of the Nation was, too.
Trouble is, only 49% was polarized in my direction.
So I find myself in an island of stunned liberalism in a red state. My fucking representative is Tom DeLay, for God’s sake, who I have been trying almost my entire adult life – unsuccessfully – to vote out of office. I was shocked a few years back to find an article entitled “Why Everyone Hates Texas”. Why, I wondered, would anyone hate us? What did we do to deserve that? Guess I know now. Though don’t expect any rollovers from me if you want to vent your spleen in my home’s direction. You’ve got just as many idiots in your neck of the woods as mine, and I don’t hate you for that.
I guess in the coming years I’m going to be feeling more and more like a member of the French Resistance, which is okay, because that means in the movies that are eventually made about these dark times, I’ll be played by some ruggedly handsome European type, instead of an aging Jack Black, which would be closer to the truth.
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