So... am I, you know, discouraged? Much?
The gnarly horns of my dillemma are these (and lo, they are gnarly indeed, like unto a very nasty Doc Johnson product):
- Whatever he was doing thirty years ago, Senator Kerry's 20-year record in the Senate provides a clear portrait of a man who just wishes that people were a bit more like him, with all his deep thoughts and complexities. I used to wish that too, until I realised that I was being arrogant and pretentious, and was too self-involved to realize that I was having my best conversations with myself in a vast echo chamber well-populated with no one else.
- No, that last bit doesn't make much sense. It's sort of a "mood sentence." Work with me here. The gist: nuance is a thing for State Dinners where one can polish one's excellent French, not for wars where your enemy just wants to turn you and everyone you care about into radioactive ash, or twitching, foaming, pox covered corpses, praise Allah, as soon as possible please.
- George Bush is surrounded by a political machine named "Karl" which knows how to win. Win, win, win! Elections, that is. The calculus is that getting out the evangelical vote and its hangers-on will secure the election, and anything that successfully resolves that equation Must Be Done.
- That means that Dubya's sensible initiation of the Iraq campaign--inasmuch as a determined effort to kill a whole lotta people can be called sensible, but monkeys will be monkeys--is tempered by all this divisive domestic nonsense that his machine has enacted in order to retain power.
Can. We. Please! Have some candidates who know how to lead us as a people, instead of one who's just good at the game and another who sucks at it?
Apparently not.
And that is why I'm just hacked off about the whole thing. Either I swing with the Naderites and say that we've all been sold into eternal slavery to our corporate masters--in which case we don't really have a say and it's not our fault anymore--or I'm forced to conclude that the citizenry just doesn't give much of a rat's ass as long as there's enough food, entertainment, and prophylactics.
I'm still banking on a voter turnout of well under 40%, in this, The Most Important Election Ever.
Now: I'm going to saddle up my Street Machine, newly outfitted with the ice blue Down Low Glow and two Cygolite Night Explorers. I will be a recumbent pedal-powered UFO in the country dark.
