So she wrote back and was very eloquent. Some of her rap could have come from a Kucinich primer. But other parts of it were still mired in that less than ingenuous ‘He’s got the job now let’s let him do it’ genuflection. So I dove back in. On this ospicious day, going the length in words to an old friend in another pasture was greatly cleansing.

11.03.04 Later

Sky Farm

I still don’t get it. You’re brilliant. You voice the Progressive agenda perfectly, and so palatably. And yet, I’m still getting this feeling that you’ve adopted that stance I’ve heard before of “I support the President because he’s the President.” Again, I can’t resist the correlations to empire: “Love Caesar for he is Caesar.” You say the people have spoken. Have they? This is such a close race that all that fancy work of the Rep’s to deny folks the right to vote in the first place may have paid off. Moreover, these guys – and when you say Bush, you’re really talking about his henchman, Cheney, Rove, Wolfowitz et. al. – ran like gang busters with their Project for A New American Century on the first go-round when the election was stolen. This time they’re going to play like they’ve got a mandate. And yet this is the worst an incumbent President has ever done and still hung on. The race was won by a tens of thousands of votes out of more than a hundred million. The voice of the people said, we really don’t like Bush’s leadership but we’ve been too duped by fear of Terror (and homo-wives) to change horses mid-stream.

There’s a book on my stack that I’ve got to get to. It’s called What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. I remember the review in the Times. The gist was that Middle America rails at the moral turpitude of two rock star women kissing on stage and then goes racing to polls to vote them a giant tax cut. The illustration that went with the review was genius. It was a voter pulling an arm on a voting machine that in turn triggered a foot that kicked the voter in the ass. They’ll vote down the “Death Tax” but then sit idly by as overtime is forfeited, lawsuits against workplace injuries are adjudicated against, a priori, and forget the bad pay, the job’s gone overseas anyway. And still these Heart-landers vote Bush. The duping has been very cleverly done and mostly along evangelical lines. Hence, not only do you have the biggest give away of public trust to corporate greed in the history of the country, but you also have a return to the historical conventions of the Crusades. Go back to your tricks of language, the present Administration is deep in a Jihad. I don’t like wars in the name of God, much less Oil. But, as one high desert Born Again sister I heard about today sums up every argument, “I’m just waiting on the rapture.”

And what demolitions of the environment will be totally irreversible by 2008. The Kyoto Protocol set 2012 as the deadline for getting greenhouses gases back to their 1996 levels. Bush’s team of scientists, the same ones who lobby against stem cell research and come from states where “evolution” is not to be found in text books, still say that Global Warming is not solid science.

I get your point that the silver lining is still the best motivator. I live that as my gospel because I’ve got a four year old silver lining to wake up to every day. She keeps me chuckling about all of this. There exists incredibly good graces and I live in the summery wind of them. I’m also glad I’m not a black gay Muslim Iraqi living in South Carolina. The Hindu system of rebirth has got me sitting pretty pretty this time round. But I’m also not employed by the Carlyle Group so I suppose I could still be doing a lot better.

I know you get my point and it’s been of infinite relief to have this epistolary dance with you to get it all out. You are esteemed and your friendship treasured. It’s been too damned long since you’ve been out to the Left Coast. Bring your new husband – Liberal or Conservative? – and we’ll take the kids out to a gay bar.

And I still want you to find me somebody who’ll make a cogent argument for voting for Bush other than God Fearing and Gay Bashing.

Papa, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

With all this sperm out there now, he’s got to be critically concerned.

A friend in New Orleans would only cop this: “As for my voting habits this morning – I voted for 2 Republicans, 3 Democrats”

But was she behind the Bush Push? She wouldn’t owe up because there’s no way to appease both her Left and Right friends. So I persisted:

11.03.04

Sky Farm

I have a hard time weighing in as Kerry Supporter. I understand that in an election cycle that spends over a billion dollars on TV advertising you have to sell your soul directly to Big Corporate interests to raise the kind of capital that the game entails. So the lesser of two evils argument runs deep here, except that I think the Bush Administration is WAY more evil. The Neo-Con’s have a very specific agenda, it’s called Project for A New American Century. If you do not understand this philosophy and totally support it then I can’t see any reason to vote Red. If you did vote Bush and are not familiar with the Neo-Con agenda then you may not be a sufficiently educated member of the electorate and that is specifically what the Karl Rove was betting on. Exit polling put a premium on a moral dilemma in this country. 11 states, Laurel, 11. People are afraid of fags getting married. That’s the moral dilemma that brought out the Right in droves. There is no worry about the moral dilemma of bombing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in far away countries. We never much worry about that. Remember Viet Nam? There’s no worry about all our boys and girls getting killed and maimed in Iraq – and for what? I ask you, for what, can you articulate our reason for being there? Because Saddam hit the Trade Towers, No. Because Saddam had WMD’s, No. Because we’re spreading “Freedom and Democracy”, No. So why should there be thousands of American casualties post “Mission Accomplished.” This is one big bad movie and if you’re into it just because it’s more exciting that Reality TV – as obviously a huge chunk of voting America is – then it’s time for massive education reform.

We have a very dumb country, and the dolts have duped themselves as today’s numbers show. You worry about your Republican friends chiding you for being a “bleeding heart.” That doesn’t mean anything outside of a Harlequin Romance Novel. But that is precisely the reality that these people are caught in. No hard facts, no hard education, in fact nothing hard, just easy Reality-that-is-not-real spiced with a fear of Fags and Muslims.

Bush was pulling ahead last night and I heard Gullianni say it, I heard Wolf Blixer say it as if it were a given, “Well, we’re at war.” NO. We’re not at war. The war on Terrorism is not a war, it’s an ideological putsch. It’s a gaff of language to keep the Military Industrial Complex stated. It’s the next phase of Cold War spending – only an unending war can necessitate 400 billion dollars alloted to military spending this year. Go spend the day trying to teach in a public school in any city of this great nation of ours and then see if you can stomach 400 billion going to the work of murder. Gay marriage is not going to bring this country down and Arabs don’t hate our Freedom Loving Way of Life. Osama bin Laden said it most poetically this week in his speech to the Free World, “I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example - Sweden?”

We as Americans are not reviled and should not seek asylum under the shelter of missiles. Our Military Presence that amounts to foreign occupation is what is reviled. It is our Imperial efforts abroad that are not being swallowed readily. It’s known in spooks lingo as Blow Back. We are bringing the biggest business in the world – WAR – to the world. And they, in fits and starts are bringing it back. Do you honestly think we’d be in the position we are today had Gore fairly won the election four years ago? This is not partisan. It’s about sanity. Please correct me where I’m wrong. Because on a day like this I’d like to be dreadfully wrong.

Counties with many graduate degrees go Kerry, the rest of the country are inborn mulliteers and hence you can hear the groundswell all the way out here on The Coast: Four More Wars!! I’m going to ask people who voted Bush to send me money, I feel that by their perversion in supporting the Squanderers they owe me. We’ll have to pool resources right away to start working for that Clinton/Obama ticket in ’08, eh?