The Question We're All Asking Ourselves...

...is: will we live through this shit, or not? Have these last few years been the thin edge of the wedge? Can we expect future stolen elections and more of the same? Basically, all our questions come down to the same thing: are we well and truly fucked?

In so many ways, I feel as if my life is in suspended animation, that I'm waiting for some sign that it's over, that everything will get back to normal, and yet, the signs I see are diffuse and indistinct, like traffic lights in the fog. Is that really red, or is it amber? It don't look fuckin' green to me, bro'. No one can tell.

Even if Karl Rove is indicted, will it stop the cretin? I often think, if indicted, he'll just resign from the White House and go to work for the RNC, where they'll install a hot line in his office directly into Dubya's brain. Instead of being down the hall, he'll be down the street. The miracle of modern communications will prevail.

It's a sign of desperation that we think it should be like it is in the movies. We don't need one of Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith in Washington, we need 535 clones of him. Fat chance of that happening, you say. Me, too. The press is like "All the President's Men," yeah. Ha. Not even close.

It's not even fun to say, "Toto, we're not in Kansas any more," because even that's a bad joke--no one sane wants to be in Kansas, any more. Kansas is fundamentalist death on a cracker, these days. Fred Phelps and his partners in moral crime think Toto is a fag. Fred Phelps thinks everyone but him is a fag. There's some weird psychopathology there, mind you. Might even involve Toto. Most of the rest of Kansas thinks Bush would be just fine with them, if he were just a bit more like Eisenhower. Maybe if he had a little less hair.

But, I dunno. I don't. The problem I have is the same one most of the rest of the country has--how do we actually know what's going on? We don't, and it's driving us all nuts. We're supposed to be living in a free, open society, and we don't have a fuckin' clue. None of us ordinary schmos know what's happening. Not a one of us. I sometimes think I know some of it. I think I get a glimpse or two behind the curtain, every now and then. Then, it all goes to dark and I'm left holding my putz and wondering what the story was all about.

We grasp at any straw, any sign of sanity, and, poof!, it's gone again. It's all so... squalid. That's the best word I can come up with right now.

Pat Roberts (Gen. Hayden's alter ego) says some very Constitutionally-suspect programs have prevented acts of terror. How do we know? That the CIA says so? That Kindasleezza says so? The word "credibility" isn't in their resumes, nor their characters. How many al-Qaeda #2s and #3s have we captured so far? Do we know they've been captured, for sure? None have come to trial. There's no way of knowing if they're getting bleach poured down their throats in the dank basement of some Bulgarian shithole, or if they're playing cards in a tea room in Cairo. We just don't know.

What we do know is that there is not a single Bushite that can tell the truth about anything. Not a single goddamned thing. Ask Donald Rumsfeld what he had for breakfast, and he'll lie about it--just as a means of staying in form.

Bush himself started lying the moment he learned to talk and has been doing it ever since. None of that would matter, except that he did it all the way through the 2000 campaign, and the press smiled and said, "but, Al Gore is the biggest phony in the universe. And his mother dresses him funny."

Maybe what I'm getting at here is that the country has gone nuts--completely starkers. And, it's catching just to live in a society where people actually pay attention to religious loonies like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, where a shark attack or a missing blonde girl gets 4000 hours of network coverage, but a story about the government spying on everyone in the whole friggin' country gets two column inches in the local paper and a 6-second non-denial denial on network news from a Bushbot, which is treated by the press as God's law come down from the mountain.

Here's just a guess about all this. If the public actually knew all of what this bunch of moral lepers in the White House were up to, it still wouldn't make much difference. It would really have to be something big to get the public's attention for more than five minutes.

"Hey, the news ticker on Fox says that Condoleezza Rice just turned into a five-foot tall cockroach and she's changing her name to Greg Sam-something."

"Yeah? Cool. She should go on American Idol."


"Whoa, Karl Rove's head exploded and there are all these tentacles slithering out of the stump of his neck!"

"Way cool. John Carpenter made a movie of that, didn't he?"


"Hmm. Just saw video of George Bush screwing a chicken on the Truman balcony."

"Poor dear, he's been under a lot of stress lately."


"Bill O'Reilly just said we should all boycott Namibia."

"That's okay, dear. I only buy Prego, anyway."


"Tony Snow just pulled out an M-16 and shot Helen Thomas about twelve times."

"Serves her right. I don't know why they let an Arab terrorist in the White House in the first place."


"Uh, Mildred, there are a whole bunch of tanks coming down the street."

"Maybe they're going to the Gomez's house. Never did like them."


"That was your mother on the phone. They just took your Uncle Harold away."

"I told him he was a damned fool for carrying that stupid sign around."


"Your picture looks real nice on your national identity card, but it didn't turn out too good on your travel permit."


"News article here says the police arrested over 300 undesirables over the weekend. Eighty drug dealers, fifty people wanted on outstanding warrants, twenty animal rights activists, sixty-three people for trying to register voters, twelve college professors and seventy-eight assorted communists, homo-sexuals and leftist types."

"I'm sure they'll all get a fair trial."


"George Bush just launched a buncha nucular missiles on Moscow, and Paris, and Berlin, and Tehran and Beijing and Caracas and the UN building in New York!"

"Hope John Bolton gets out of there okay... do we still have time to get to the mall?"







It could be worse, though.


Rick Santorum could be the second Messiah. Then we'd know for sure that we were all fucked.