As almost everyone must know by the time he or she arrives at this lowly website, Bush is in for another 4 years.
The only good news I could find looking at the election was that it can only be 4 years, possible coups aside. My friend Marvin has more to say about that in terms of good news and bad news, though, and his words are at least encouraging to those of us who can’t understand how the nascent fascism of all things Bush didn’t irk the hell out of America. (And on that, another interesting recent post by Marvin here discusses similarities between Germany in Nietzsche’s time and America now.)
Oh, and Marvin, I don’t know about in America but if the young are anything like they are in Canada or in Korea, I think it’s probably a combination of lack of interest, laziness, a political culture that is focused on (and seemingly “for”) the older set, and also a lot of ignorance. There are significant differences between Korea and Canada in these things, of courseCanadians tend to be much less age-conscious, as they’re not living in a Confucian societybut in general I think that youthful mediocrity doesn’t vote, and older mediocrity votes.
Finally, as for what I think. I think that the whole dichotomy of left and right is a haphazard joke, that the two parties aren’t really representative of that anymore, that there is no real opposition party (yet) in America, because nobody’s effectively opposing the nascent fascism of the Bush Regime, and while the percentages look better than in two thousand, any poem written about this should be an elegy for America’s dignity. Imagine the land that bills itself as the land of freedom and truth and justice, voting in someone whose policy is so reminiscent of George Orwell’s most overt warnings (in 1984). Imagine a populace who chooses someone who demands Oaths of Loyalty, as if he were a king. Imagine a society that, in the majority, uses the fact of a wrongly-commenced wartime to justify electing a man who avoided war through almost the sneakiest legalist loophole possible, instead of a man who’s actually gone to war (not that I think it’s such a grand thing, it’s just ironic).
Or better yet, a populace the majority of which is absolutely ignorant of the fact it’s been had, by a Regime that purposefully set out to deceive it.
Things may turn around in a few years. Maybe there’ll be a turnaround in the press, maybe an awakening with spread through America. I don’t know, and I doubt it, but it may happen. So when you write your elegies, don’t make them permanent. But nothing that is written now should be anything but an elegy to the lost dignity of what America has always told us it was all about.
And yeah, it’s not my country. But you just try to tell me it’s not my business.