Click, Drag and Delete have been pretty busy tonight. I keep trying to write something coherent, but bullshit comes out instead. My tolerance for bullshit is pretty low, and getting lower all the time.
I've been trying to make sense of the post-election babble. What are people really trying to say? Because 51 percent of us were too stupid to vote for W, the country's going straight to hell in a handbasket? Funny thing; most of the people who seem to be the most blue about Kerry's loss have access to computers and a good command of the written word, and jobs that give them a platform to share their feelings. Most of the people who stand around with my wife waiting to pick up their kids from school couldn't be more pleased with the election results. I know of nobody among the rapidly widening circle of friends we're gaining here on the Western Edge who voted for Kerry. If they did, they're doing a good job verbally faking their happiness over the result of the election.
What does that actually prove? Well, really, nothing. My suburb might or might not be typical. I would lean toward "not." A majority of my neighbors are officers in the Air Force, who work at the nearby base that houses Central Command. Some of them are headed to Iraq soon. Some of them have had to send people who report to them over there. All of them have strong feelings about the war, for and against. All of them voted for Bush.
It seems very possible that we're outgrowing our little democracy. What "unites" us? Really, nothing.
It took the deaths of 3,000 people who decided to not skip work one Tuesday in 2001 to get us to unite for a common cause, and that lasted, what, about two months? Then we were back to bitching and squabbling and back-biting. And that's not the fault of the left; if we must resort to schoolyard discourse (and apparently we must), the right started the whole "we're perfect and you're stupid" thing. They started it ...
An aside that doesn't really fit in anywhere else in this rant: Stop trying to convince me George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging functional illiterate. He's not the most articulate person who's ever stood in front of the Great Seal. But last time I checked, they weren't just handing out degrees from Yale, even to people whose dads went there. I dropped out of a not-very-prestigious state university. I'm not going to pretend I'm smarter than somebody who found a way to make it through Yale.
God knows there's hypocrisy to spare in both red and blue hues. Bill Clinton was a womanizer who got a hummer from a chubby babe right there in the Oval Office. His successor sat in that same Oval Office and sent people off to die for ... well, for ... well, to defend us against ... uh, dammit, we had to bomb somebody! Michael Moore is a lying sack of shit. So is Ken Lay and the rest of his Enron cronies. I'm not sure any of Moore's lies have cost anybody their retirement savings.
Bottom line: We're facing a pretty serious hero shortage on both sides. Why? Because the good people are too damn smart to get involved. Colin Powell knows better. You know somebody's gunning for Barack Obama, the latest political Flavor of the Month,; not to attack his political ideas, all of which are sound, but to find out which of his college girlfriends he cheated on or how many speeding tickets he has or some other indiscretion with an actual relevance value of zero. We're going to be stuck with Hillary Clinton in 2008, not because she's the best or the brightest, but because she has good "name recognition."
The pool of statesmen and stateswomen is pretty thin these days. Good leaders are out there, but they're too busy leading to get caught up in the smoke-and-mirrors act that is the United States political system. The truly intelligent and visionary people don't want to play the game -- or they get drummed out of the game. (See index entries "McCain, John, too much integrity for own good," and "Dean, Howard, too visionary and passionate to be taken seriously").
Besides, we don't really want a leader as our president. We want somebody who looks good on TV and who can quip one-liners. We don't want a human; we want an image. Is Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of California because he has an advanced degree in international economics? No. Did you know he has an advanced degree in international economics? Probably not. Lots of people have degrees in international economics. None of them was the Terminator. You likely won't see any of them as the governor of California.
So, now that I've declared the Repbulic extinct, what do I care about? I care that I'm not paying more than my fair share of the tax burden. I care that the things for which I am paying those taxes are of the highest quality, and are being built and maintained by people who are themselves being paid a living wage. I care that my children are safe, and I know that's primarily the responsibility of my wife and me. I'm less worried about international terrorists than I am about the registered sex offender who lives eight houses away from us. I care that the person who's being paid to watch him while he's on probation is doing her job. (We checked. She is.) I care mostly about stuff that's happening within about a 12-mile radius of wherever I am at the moment.
The most important vote I cast last Tuesday wasn't for president; it was for sheriff and the county commission.
I'm not choosing to be isolated; I'm choosing to mind my own house, and to take as much control as possible of what I can see. I'm participating in the process, but only to the extent where it affects me. I don't care what they do in Boston. I don't care what they do in Wyoming. I'm not sure anybody else in my immediate line of sight does, either. My hot-button issue is not abortion, or gay marriage, or "moral values," whatever the fuck that means. My issue is taxes. Bush sees it my way on taxes. Therefore, I voted for Bush. It's up to the people I send to Congress to keep him honest. (My vote for Senate went to the Democratic candidate, who lost to her slimebag opponent by about 132 votes ... Oops, there we go with the schoolyard stuff again. My bad. But he is a slimebag.) Bush wouldn't have been able to send all those people off to die if Congress hadn't let him. Kerry wasn't going to do anything about it anytime soon. All things being basically equal -- and they were -- the Republicans keep my taxes low, I'm voting Republican. As soon as the Democrats find some way to make it personally beneficial for me to vote for them, I'll vote for them.
So much for "united" states, huh? That's pretty much what I'm suspecting.
A logical criticism for what I have just written would go as follows: "You wrote god-knows-how-many-hundred-words and I still don't know what you believe." If that's the case, you weren't paying attention, and I'll sum it up in a few sentences.
I believe in the power of the individual, and I believe in the power of integrity and vision. Few of the choices with which I was presented last Tuesday showed me any of that. I support integrity and vision, no matter what party provides it. Does that explain anything?
(I'm not sure that this was any lower on the bullshit scale than any of the stuff that fell victim to Click, Drag and Delete, but I needed something to show for the last hour of typing. If I lose my balance while standing on this fence, it's really going to hurt my nuts. Click "Publish Post" and go on to the next thing, I guess.)
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