Rest In Peace Horatio Alger

Like any nightmare, it takes awhile before you realize you're awake. It's taken me about three weeks (maybe four) to come to grips with the great power shift we're embarking on right now with Obama. I could hardly process all the policies we could change, shutting down Guantanamo Bay, restoring Habeas Corpus, reducing carbon emissions and ending No Child Left Behind. Here's a few thoughts on the changing world around us.

We live in cruel and unusual times. The death of the American Dream seems to have given off one last gasp of belly acid, lulling us into perhaps one final and eternal sleep. A bomb went off in a bank just south of here the other day in Woodburn. Could terrorism strike in Who-Knows-Where, Oregon? Conceivable, yes. But they arrested a White Man. Go back to bed. Yes, the nation is gripped by fear. Faced with the reality that a Black Man will in fact become President of the United States, gun sales across the country have soared. If the election showed that Hope had won over Fear, it didn’t prove there wasn’t still a healthy amount of mistrust and downright terror through Middle America.

In a month from now, the Great White Whale will finally vacate its illegitimate seat on the throne and condemn itself to the waste bin of seriously fucked up leaders who did more to bring the world to ruin than anything else. If the great gifts of all the bodhisattvas were to come true, Bush & Rumsfeld & Cheney & Rove would all find themselves behind bars for one simple but enormous dereliction of civil misconduct and modern law: They authorized torture. The senate report that came out last week proved it, that torture was OK’d at the highest levels, most notably Rumsfeld. Case closed. Shackle the bastards and rope ‘em up. These are no innocent times.

For the past eight years we’ve been living in the end times, most of us too despair to leave the confines of our fortified dwellings. We’ve been bombarded by mortars on all sides, first the environment, then education and of course the Great Myth of the War on Terror. We’ve become so used to defeat that it’s hardly real that the man who should take his place is the embodiment of such Hope and Promise. We can hardly imagine where to begin in putting our world back together.

But first, the reptile scum must stamp their last bloody tracks on our Constitution. The Bush years were a sad, predictable fate for a country that never seems to learn anything from history, G.W. himself the walking flesh of the ugliest – downright reptilian – American the world would ever know. Before this, people had only been acquainted with the cartoon version played by Chevy Chase and others. Thirty years after the great pigfucker of them all – Nixon – was thrown from office and his henchmen imprisoned, we allowed the same bunch of criminals to waltz right back into our house, acting naïve enough to believe that they couldn’t do that much damage. How bad could it be? Eight years later, and the death and destruction is much higher than we had ever imagined. Every day, we learn more about the house of cards we call our economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being thrown around like monopoly money. Retirement accounts are dropping like rotting apples, leaving the American dream to decay in the weeds. It’s dead, good and buried. Rest In Peace, Horatio Alger.

So we emerge now, like beasts from hibernation, to rebuild our nation’s greatest promise. But let us reflect on what we’ve learned not only about the Bush crime ring and degenerate scumsuckers of which they surround, but the nature of our own souls faced with such evil. I came over the years to believe, as Kurt Vonnegut once did, that street protests were about as effective as a banana cream pie. We took to causes in different ways, challenging a jaded generation from the 60s to look down over their bifocals and realize we were a lot more effective than they ever were because most of us actually cared about the causes and didn’t want to just dance around smoking dope and playing bongo drums on account of evil times. But we all should question whether we did enough to confront the darkness. I don’t know if I really did. I guess no amount of confrontation to such monumental injustice could live up to any decent notions of “reasonable” response. We ran out the clock and swore we’d move to Canada when alas: Enough American people woke up to elect the right man.