I’m really neglecting my weblog in the interest of time, but I thought I would repost my last big entry, since I am still smarting!
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Well, the elections have finally allowed the public to speak, and the minute their electoral mouths opened, most of the country did their best impressions of the once cliched “Stupid, Shallow Americans”.
What the election results say to me is that most of the people in America don’t have the intellect or the courage to face the difficult answers to difficult questions. Instead they prefer trite, conservative platitudes and the easy, shallow allure of egocentric patriotism. Americans don’t want to participate in the world community because they are convinced (in a sad irony that makes this election a coup paid for with the blood of the victims of the World Trade Center) that they are the only important entity on the planet. They don’t need to worry about the environment as long as they have what they want. Who cares about the very young, the very old, the poor, or the imprisoned, as long as they and their own can rake in the cash and glory in the power of being the “sole superpower.”
World affairs? Forget it. America first! We will never bow to any other country’s demands. Negotiation and an understanding of foreign affairs? Screw that, we are America, and George Bush has given you your answer– do it our way or prepare to become a highway under the feet of our military. Civil liberties? Sorry, in order to fight terrorism we must abandon these tired ideas. We must destroy liberty in order to save it. We are fighting for peace and fucking for virginity (thanks Steven Wright).
I have never been more ashamed of this country than I am right now. That we have so many people in thrall to a slack-jawed intellectual midget like George Bush and his war-seeking, environment-raping, civil liberties-destroying circus tag team of puppet masters and sycophants makes me physically ill.
That we have become a stunted nation that not only has no interest in the rest of the world and no interest in co-existing with divergent opinion, but is willing to mortgage social security, social programs and the future for short-term gains and a dismantling of the fundamental separation of church and state while the opportunity exists, makes me want to start kicking puppies.
That anyone with a mass on top of their brain stem is willing to buy the lies behind the ridiculous, hypocritical war on Iraq and support a president that is for executing the mentally retarded, that maintains that giving federal monies to churches and religious schools is not an abridgment of the constitution, that refuses to take a principled stand on ANY issue… in short that this country’s population is unwilling to do the hard work of finding answers in order to appease themselves with empty patriotism, empty war efforts, and a vacous war on terror justifying their every base instinct to indulge in every unfairness and sickness from racial profiling to destroying privacy to allowing prejudice to masquerade as logic– it leaves me absolutely dumbfounded and sick.
You know that cliche where you can shower and shower but never be clean again? It’s no cliche. This is a watershed marking the beginning of the steepest decline in whatever credibility, substance, and quality this country and its population might have once had.
(And the Democrats aren’t off the hook either. In addition to swallowing a lame– and schizophrenic– Supreme Court decision conferring the presidency upon Shrub, they have continued to roll over and play dead. They are a cat that played too long with the mouse and the mouse got away. They should have banded to block the Iraq resolution, kill the budget, squish the tax cut, condemn rich-man croneyism when Bush and friends continued to give Enron and other companies a free ride, hoist Ashcroft and Cheney aloft by their asses for conflicts of interest, illegal profits, and lies, keelhauled Bush for reneging on nuclear and environmental treaties, called them on their fabrications regarding terrorist ties to Iraq… the list goes on and on. Their cowardice cost them now, and in the long term.)