Only inattentive idiots think that the weather’s a boring subject to talk about. Take today, for example: after a half-week of chilling winds, the sudden burst of sunlight and heat afflicting us down here in sunny San Jose is like getting slapped across the face with a towel soaked in boiling water. Whereas its cold counterpart is a wakeful stinging, a hot-water whip does more to damage one’s reactions than it does to stir it. It is a vicious assault, leaving you woozy and incoherent, your attention span focused not on your treacherous assailant, but the burning urgency of the injury. It is like being belittled by your parents- you’re angry, you’re enraged, and the sheer heat of the insult leaves you absolutely unable to do anything but scream incoherently.
Indeed, the weather’s a fascinating topic.
Unfortunately, as of late, my opinion towards politics has not been as positive. I had started this year with much anticipation. Much optimism, even. This was gearing up to be one king hell campaign, the sort that defines an entire era of American politics. In some ways, it still is- the utterly unprecedented neck-to-neck fight between a woman and a minority for the Democratic candidate will mark itself down in history textbooks for the years to come.
But that’s pretty much the only thing that will come out of this era. That little footnote. That tiny statement about what a carnival freak show the presidential election of 2008 has become. Why? Because John Fucking McCain is going to win one for the Good Ol’ Posse this time around. If you haven’t heard it yet, you heard it here first, folks: say hello to another four, another eight years of shoveling elephant shit.
Eris, there goes the tattered remains of my good mood.
The reasoning is depressingly simple. The longer the Democratic elections go on, the greater the tinge of desperation and hopelessness will plague the eventual victor- regardless of whether it’s Clinton or Obama, it doesn’t matter (though Clinton’s original, smug claim of “inevitability” is, to my regret, starting to ring true again). The well has been poisoned. The inability to conclude the race all the way back during the Californian primaries was the bullet and the smoking gun.
It’s an almost mathematical order of priority. To gun for the top office of the nation, the candidates must necessarily gun for official recognition under their parties. That’s simple to understand. But, in order to do that, they must direct their ammunition, the full force of their media engines, against their counterparts within their own party. The other side isn’t even a consideration! Time is a scarce resources- time and media exposure. You need X amount of ads out in Y amount of stations airing during period Z of any given day- period Z being that sweet spot when the audience is at its fullest. That’s real estate- high-priced real estate at that. And the price isn’t money- not at all.
The price is who you aren’t targeting.
McCain must be laughing his old, wrinkly ass off, the decrepit, traitorous bastard. Those two young punks on the Democratic side of the aisle are beating each other bloody- all he needs to win is to feed them ammunition- make it so that no matter who comes out of that particular fight, they will not come out without a few gaping wounds, a few pints of blood short. Political elections are an endurance test- a matter of who can go longest without collapsing under the terrible weight of public opinion and the farce that is party politics. While Clinton and Obama are sprinting for all their worth, Old Man McCain is sipping whiskey out of the asscracks of nubile young boys as his party all too eagerly gives him a ride to the finish.
What? Am I being nonobjective? Is my language crass and boorish? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Our parents grew up selfish and self-serving under the terrible weight of Nixon, Kissinger and all the rest of the gang of moral cripples of the seventies and eighties. They killed the very foundation of a benevolent democracy, ramping up the entire nation’s cynicism to a soul-withering, heart-blackening eleven, making a mockery of the Vote and the Process and Due Rights and Liberties. We thought we had just about panned out with the first Clinton administration, we thought that our economic surpluses- and, good Eris, does the word “surplus” sound so good these days- would finally have us commence that long, slow but hopeful climb back up to honor and repute.
And… now.
Let me tell you something about how the inheriting generation was raised- let me tell you something about what you’ve taught your children. We were born in the aftermath of the Cold War, born to believe in America’s greatness, born to relish our national identity. We were raised to expect greatness- after all, was the triumph over the Soviet Union not proof of our God-given destiny? We had overcome great evil, and we were the kings of the world.
Never mind Vietnam. Never mind the 1960s, treated so often these days as a private shame, a moment of taboo. The Flower Children of that era are outcasts now, only the Disneyfied version of their message of universal brotherhood and peace and enlightenment given anything remotely like lip service. Never mind that repulsive Watergate thing. Shit happens- keep your eye on the fact that we’re America and we’re great.
Forget about critical analysis. Forget about thinking for yourself. Look at what happened to the so-called “free thinkers” during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Look at the folks that dared support a liberal like George McGovern. Acid, Abortion and Amnesty indeed. That’s commie talk, even if nobody can remember what Communism was about anymore. That’s the sort of shit that gets your kids beaten up at school, the abuses physical and psychological heaped onto them… and deftly ignored, or half-heartedly dealt with, by school officials whose only backing in educational and child-rearing research and theory is the flimsy certificate, authorizing them to “teach,” attached to their names.
Depressed yet? You should be. Yet… yet there was a moment, just earlier, when it didn’t seem so bad, did it? A moment not too long ago at all when it seems as if we were riding some crazy new wave of hope and defiance.
“He’s our man. Yeah, he’s got dark-colored skin- we don’t care. Yeah, his name rhymes with Osama- we don’t fucking care. Can your fucking cynicism- we don’t need that shit here. He’s the only guy out there talking about net neutrality and government openness. He’s the only guy telling us that we shouldn’t be afraid of the world. He’s the guy telling us that young men shouldn’t fight the quarrels of old men, that we should put our trust in human progress, that there’s still a future to live, a hope to have, a dream to make true. He’s our man, and we want him to hold the reins for a while!”
Fuck, Hunter. Why’d you have to die, you bitter old bastard? I can’t get anywhere close to the right words for how I feel right now, for the bitter intermingling of continued hope and dark fear that’s plagued me since my own fellow citizens in this state rejected that plea for a light, a way out of this dark, dank tunnel we’ve dug down.
This could’ve been the first generation in nearly half a century- half a goddamn century- to truly bring some change to this world of ours. We have tools at our disposal, knowledge at hand, that our parents and parent’s parents could’ve barely dreamed about- ways to propagate memetic packages faster, more coherently, more assuredly than a hundred thousand gurus, than a megaton of LSD, mescaline and weed.
We stepped into this quagmire with the flamethrower of truth and honor and pride lighting the way. We, and we alone, took the once-poor dark-skinned underdog and launched him up on a terminal flight to success, and fame, and glory. We were wiser than our predecessors, more clearheaded, and richer by far in knowledge. The combined wisdom of the human race was a plaything to us- the massed forces of Media and Money were wringing their hands in desperation, trying to figure out how to subvert us, how to conquer this vast electron cloud, never knowing that the key to their failure was in treating it as just another form of top-down hierarchal memetic transmission, not Democracy in its truest, most terrible and most beautiful form.
We were a brand new, never-before-seen generation of true democratic patriots, by Eris. Foolish, naïve, but wielding so much power, even the superdelegates, Establishment flunkies to the very last men, were bowing to our will. The heady rush! What a high! HST was right- in some ways, in some small, twisted ways, politics was better than sex!
And who knows? We might still pull through with it yet. The delegates are still slowly turning to Our Man. There might be one last shot- one last, final shot- to blow this ominous cloud of cynicism away like a bad dream, a mere puff into nothing. We’re teenagers. Young adults. It is our mete, our fundamental nature, to rebel. We’re idealistic enough to believe, truly and honestly believe, in making dreams come true, and we will rebel mightily against those that dare say otherwise.
I have all the reason in the world to cuss and slander the opposition. It’s more than an office at stake, and it’s more personal than some vague comment about the nation’s future. It’s very fucking personal indeed. The winner of this election holds in their hands the ability to make or break two generations: ours and whomever comes after. The outcome of this election decides how my entire generation ends up- whether or not we’ll end up like our predecessors, crippled by the ghostly weight of this failed experiment into politics, forced to agree with the cynicism of our supposed superiors as to the helplessness, the pointlessness of the vote, forced to conclude that the Great Experiment conducted by Washington, by Jefferson, by Franklin and others have failed.
Or whether or not it is possible for a dedicated body of people to unflinchingly turn their heads up to the sun, to scream an eagle’s cry of defiance, echoing loudly across the vast deserts, the dark canyons, the wind-polished crags of the mountains of the world.
They say it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. I’d rather set off a nuke.
Mahalo,
Gonzo Mehum the First, Pope
Erisian Noosphere of North America
HAIL HAIL ERIS ERIS ERIS
