11/15/06
Talk about the winter of your discontent -- I've had a winter, spring, summer and fall of it, three years running. Six if you count the halcyon times Before The Great Iraq Idiocy. It's hard to remember back that far nowadays, what with the nonstop wonders of Freedom On The March stomping across whatever remnants of civilian media remain like so many muddy-booted gorilla children defacing your nice clean kitchen floor. And then raiding the banana bin.

It's been so discouraging, in fact, that I had a hard time summoning the ability to even hope, despite the recurrent nagging rumors of a Democratic resurgence. It seemed so much easier to just slump back into the bedbug-ridden flophouse mattress of despair, moistly comforted, or at least anesthetized, by the glum assumption that somehow, some way, the Dummies would step in it with golf shoes and the Pubes would triumph again.

I wasn't alone either -- at least one of my fruity liberal pals was so far gone that he was sending out invitations well before E Day for an aftermath combination wake and war-council to plan demonstrations in the event that the redsters managed to pull off yet another presumed computer coup. Even in my state of "one more bummer election and I'm moving to Victoria," that seemed a trifle premature. It's one thing to presume the malfeasance of your opponents, but quite another to grant them godlike powers of haxx0r 1337n3ss Never attribute to malicious genius what can easily be explained by crap engineering.

Heck, even the GOP was suffering from delusions of omnipotence, resulting in campaign rhetoric most charitably summed up as -- well, boilerplate, actually. Really really cheap boilerplate. Here in Washington On The Pacific, it's highly to the credit of our recumbent incumbent senator Maria Cantwell (she's a babe!) that she ran almost entirely on her record, leaving her opponent spouting increasingly uncivil, self-contradictory and near-nonsensical attacks and empty promises that showed him up for the cheap used-car salesman of a pol that he all too clearly was. The tone and body language of their tv ads reflected their stances even with the sound off, Cantwell relaxed and gracious and self-assured amidst her constituents, McGaven shirtsleeved, hunch-shouldered, grinning-angry and appallingly bald on a blank-white background graffitied with boldfaced accusations in sans-serif news-headline fonts. Somebody's ad agency blew it bigtime. It was a pattern that was apparently repeated more or less nation-wide.

All this, of course, led to the spectacle of ol' Unca George, well and truly whupped for once, climbing down off his combination hobbyhorse and throne and actually attempting some polite discourse with his erstwhile sworn enemies and implied terrorists, the very picture of an imam sitting in on Sabbath services and chanting Baruch ata Adonai right along with the congregation. Too good to last, surely, but even a ray of sunshine is a boon in this murk we've been slogging through.

That single shaft of ecumenical starlight doesn't include the proclamations of the not-all-that-different New Bosses that they aim for cooperation with their Honorable Colleagues. I may be old and deaf but I remember hearing similar ass-wind emanating from the other side of the aisle back in 2001. D's as well as R's heed the Nordquist Stricture that bipartisanism is a synonym for date-rape, and there's not a chance in Disneyworld that any sweet cuddly promises can survive the first federal judge confirmation hearing, let alone the Great Drug Benefit Giveaway rollback. And for all the shortness of their tails, the elephants are more than ready to start squealing the minute anybody puts their foot down within a hundred yard radius.

Besides which, this change in the weather bears more resemblance to the eye of the hurricane than an all-clear. Those poofty radicals and their happy dances are about one bout of the flu away from a whole different shuffle, at least in the Senate. It's possible that the saner heads amongst the centerleft are aware enough of this to at least make the semblence of extending an olive branch to their opposite numbers on the centerright, even if it is spiked.

I'd be delighted to be wrong. The fine and tested Amurkin spirit of compromise and log-rolling and quidding the ol' pro quo has been terribly damaged by the horde of Men Of Principle And Honor who've blustered their way into positions of authority over the past fifty or so years, men right and left, up and down, hemale and shemale who let iron discipline and steadfast adherence to abstract truthy dictums of Morality and similar humorous fallacies bulldoze the greasily opulent palace of Gettin' Along, then engaged in protracted and fruitless debates over what kind of iron fortress to throw up in its place. At present we're left with a barren battlefield strewn with wreckage and dead warriors and not a building permit in sight. Even a crummy puptent of shared responsibility and purpose would be preferable to the raggedy Big Tent of either wing of the plutocracy.

The real cause for cheer this season is that, for whatever reason, the good voting burgers of My Country Tis Of Thee have shaken off their fearful slumber and appear ready to start actually running things again. Maybe the GOP played their schoolyard bully thing a little too far. Maybe images of the twin towers tumbling down and Osama bin Laden with a saber in his teeth have lost their scaryness, like rubber monsters in a '50's scifi flick. Maybe a few more people are feeling less like monitoring what their neighbors do in bed. Maybe we're just tired of yelling all the time. But something like rationality appears poised to move into the credibility vacuum that is modern public discourse, and that could be the best thing for our country in quite a while.

But I'm putting you clowns on notice: one more harebrained war and I'm outta here. Don't say you haven't been warned.