Being a little late for work this morning, I was fortunate enough to hear the BBC’s coverage of Mubarak’s resignation as it was happening.  Tahrir Square was a cacophony of cheers.  I can’t recall ever hearing such mass jubilation as I did on the radio today. The joy in that crowd was irrepressible; it was incredible and uplifting to hear in real time.

The road ahead won’t be easy, and it will be interesting to watch how the political landscape in Egypt takes shape over the next few months and years as they begin to grapple with their government.  The United States will surely be watching in hopes that the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow marginalized and kept out of executive power; I hope, though, that America doesn’t do too much meddling.  Egypt is not Iran, nor is this revolution going to turn out like Iran’s did, I don’t think.  The best thing for the Middle East right now is to have a country like Egypt organically embrace and forge a strong secular democracy, which seems likely for the moment.

President Obama was worried, in the beginning, that Mubarak would retain power and that any show of support from the United States to the protesters could potentially sacrifice political ties with Egypt.  Now, he is openly embracing the revolution, a sentiment I suspect his administration probably harbored privately all along, but wouldn’t it have been nice if he had spoken up two weeks ago?

He was worried about being on the wrong side of history, of course.  But the wrong side of history was the one Mubarak was on, no matter who would have won this showdown.

It’s a good day to be an Egyptian.

Courtesy of goodrob13's photostream. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodrob13/3928208574/)

So the Obama administration is presently hemorrhaging classified information courtesy of WikiLeaks, the Bush administration is doing so posthumously, the earth’s crust is hemorrhaging oil, and Tom Vilsack is simply battling an embarrassing case of hemorrhoids after/during the stress of the Shirley Sherrod debacle.  Those are the big stories at the moment, but in true form for a real live Twenty-First Century Narcissist, I’m not really thinking about all that right now.

Something terrible happened on Sunday at Dave & Buster’s… I lost.

In and of itself, losing is not a rarity in my life though I am, in general, more accustomed to winning.  But on Sunday evening, I lost in a big way.  I lost at everything.  Even now, my ego hasn’t restored itself, nor will the chasm be sated or filled by gobbling up Scrabble wins and cheap, trivial victories.  The merciless drubbings I received left me pithed like a dissected frog against a lab mat, immobile and dumb, twitching violently, wanting for an elusive victory at something, anything.

First, I absorbed two straight losses at what was essentially a free throw competition — something I don’t believe I’d ever lost until two nights ago — and then a demoralizing defeat at the Super Shot basketball game.  I was put away handily on the air hockey table by a score of 7-2, at the trivia board three straight times in a row, and I managed to die before my partner in two co-op campaigns on Terminator: Salvation and House of the Dead 4.  I am still surprised I avoided making a hellish scene and tearing some poor child’s arms off in a rabid, ego-fueled frenzy.  There is nothing that incites a petulant rage quite like the perturbation of the competitive spirit, and in my twenty-six years of competing at various events, I have never taken the prospect lightly, which has cost me more than one enjoyable evening playing Taboo or Risk with friends.  (The two remaining teams in a game of risk cannot enter into an alliance with the intention of ending the game in a truce when other armies have been exhausted.  The game must be played to the death.  The incident that spawned this aside happened nearly two years ago and serves as a cautionary tale to all Risk players that treaty restrictions must be stipulated before the game, and in the interest of competition, alliances should generally be disallowed.)  I did manage to win the Daytona racing game, but there isn’t much satisfaction in placing first when the difficulty is set to Easy, the transmission to Automatic, and the game itself is a subpar racer made by SEGA in 1994.

Whether this rage is the justifiable product of primate evolution or a pathetic shard of the male ego still buried in my amygdala (probably both), I almost never see the point in playing “for fun”.  Playing for fun is playing to win, and the fun comes as a by-product of real competition, not half-assed lollygagging through a novel activity.  I don’t want any mealy-mouthed “the fun is in the journey” platitudes either.  The journey isn’t fun unless you care about the destination, and if you don’t care about the destination, why take the journey?  This isn’t to say that I’m always an unreasonable loser, but most people who know will probably tell you that I’m certainly not a tranquil one.  I’d be loath to disagree with them publicly and at the risk of self-delusion.

But that’s just one asshole’s opinion, a maligned philosophy that emanates from a severely wounded ego, and if you must know, while I’d been planning to post on the site for a few days now, the only reason I got around to it this afternoon is because Master Gorman needled me this morning and pointed out that he was beating me easily in the post ratio.

Trust me, I’m bordering on illiterate right now as I’ve been staring dumbly at this computer screen for going on six hours with very little to do but ponder the slow waste of the world, the burden of being a vile loser, and the long-term implications of muscle atrophy.  I am in no condition to be blogging, and if you were looking for, you know, information, you’ve caught me on the wrong day.  If you catch me on the right day, you might get to read some better dressed gibberish, more eloquent bullshit.  You might not be subjected to such public conceit. (Neil, there will be actual content next time.  I promise.)

So for now, it’s time to suck down my private devastation and try to see the bigger picture.  Stare into the Hubble Deep Field image I’ve now made my desktop wallpaper and contemplate smallness for awhile.  Make this nightmare seem mercifully silly.

This article is cross-posted at Foolish Human.

I’m not one of those people that plays golf often as I find it is best enjoyed sparingly and only after adhering to a months-long regimen of intense meditation, masturbation, and dieting.  Anything less might allow for my violent competitiveness to creep in and ruin the day for everyone.  Indeed.  No one who competes against me in anything, be it darts, pool, basketball, or jacks (etc.) will end up enjoying himself very much.  If I perform well, I normally win by a large enough margin to make the game seem pointless, and if I am losing, I will fall into petulance and throw a conniption fit with little regard for the embarrassment caused by my actions. It’s a bad scene and one from which I recommend abstinence at all costs.  There is nothing like seeing a grown, half-bearded man in a straw hat and brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt stomping on the green and digging large ruts into the fairway with his 9-iron as happened today.  By the sixth hole (of nine) I was putting with a severely bent Diamondback putter that became so when I took aim at my golf bag with an old 9-wood and made what essentially proved to be my only solid contact of the day.

That was my Father’s Day gift to my dad.  How proud he must be of his 25-year-old son.

For now, it might be feasible to blame last night’s thunderstorms for flooding the course and forcing me to decide against wearing my red canvas Converse One-Stars.  Whereas the bane of my golf swing since time immemorial has been a more or less consistent and wicked slice, I kept hitting the ball off the heal of my club and putting a nasty draw on it.  Somehow, my monster drives were stolen and replaced with low-flying line drives that seemed almost magnetically attracted to the tree lines.

But it does seem shortsighted to bitch and moan about a golf game, let alone my first of the year, no matter how badly it went awry.

After all, Tehran continues to reel in the turmoil of Ahmadinejad v. Mousavi.  I have no doubt the election was fixed, but without international press allowed into Iran to report on the situation, it is difficult to know exactly what is what.  Mousavi was the former prime minister of Iran and has ties to Khomeini that are badly covered or glossed over in the Western press, facts that don’t require access to the country and should be well-publicized.  In perusing the blogosphere, I saw one comment on Anonymous Iran that went like this: “Agreed, Mousavi was more of an excuse than anything. And the spark led to a fire that is by no means about him anymore.”  So it sounds to me like Mousavi is not the reformist/outsider he was cracked up to be, and it stands to reason the the comment from Anonymous Iran might not be far from the truth.

Long before the election and the subsequent Iranian protests, the conventional wisdom stated that most Iranians did not possess the combative, ultra-conservative bent of the clinically insane Ahmadinejad.  The kids listen to Western music, wear Western clothes, and more or less, adhere to Western ideals while behind closed doors.  Sure, the view from the street was much different, but the society operated on a society-wide version of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.  Now, they’ve got a figurehead and a rallying point, and for their sake, I hope they win.  I don’t think they will, but anything that serves to dislodge or destabilize the theocratic element in their government — and, by that, I mean the Ayatollah and his clerics and, while they’re at it, Ahmadinejad — is a movement I’m likely to support.

Don’t get me wrong.  During the Bush years and before, I get the sense that the United States dealt with Iran very crassly and without nuance, and to some extent, Obama might not have sufficiently changed that tune yet.  There has been eerie but understandable silence from the White House on this matter, and any commentary that they have proffered has been tepid and unsure.  Unable to offer blunt support for the protesters, they’ve opted to criticize the Iranian government for little more than the obvious, the deaths of innocent civilians.

Until everything boils over, though, we might as well add a supportive green tint to our Twitter avatars since that’s the level at which political action operates these days.

Alas, I don’t think I have a leftist, pinko Commie diatribe in me tonight.  I have yet to respond to American Patriot’s comments on my Patton article, which are well-received regardless of whether or not I share a political hair with him/her.  I appreciate a little scrutiny now and again (maybe even always), and if there’s one thing my half-assed, lazy commentary can use, it’s some point-by-point analysis.

Two things I will address now, however.  The first is that the Marijuana Question should not be a point of contention or debate any longer.  Legalization is the only sensible route, and this concept will only be confirmed in the next ten or twenty years.  The government does not have the right to tell people not to use drugs (recreationally or for medicinal purposes) and wastes resources prosecuting and apprehending “criminals” who pose no threat to society at large.  Coupled with other drug-related efforts such as needle exchange programs, there should be a shift toward a sensible drug policy, one that does not uphold prohibitive law.  American Patriot seems to harbor an additional moralistic attitude to drug use and general inebriation, which I would discourage at all costs.  Lifestyle morality has no place being legislated by governing bodies as long as a person’s activities are non-violent, and to answer American Patriot’s question, yes, I do think there are more important things on America’s plate right now than the legalization of drugs.  Our current policy, however, reflects a troublesome national mindset that is constantly bothered by petty things like marijuana and tits on television and ignores issues like unsustainable housing bubbles and corrupt credit markets (until the shit hits the fan, of course).  Think where we might be now if our resources had been allocated toward useful endeavors in the first place.

I should stress that while I had my college days like most other people, I am sober almost one-hundred percent of the time these days, and by that, I do not mean to insinuate that I am recovering from any lingering addictions or recreational drug habits save for nicotine.  The comment American Patriot made: “I have never heard of a ‘social’ pot smoker — a person who has a joint here or there just because they like to smoke or like the flavor of marijuana. No, they do it to get stupid and get high, just like alcoholics drink to excess and act irresponsibly. Legalize pot and you’ll see a lot more drunk driving occurring in this country,” makes so little sense that I feel odd even addressing the remarks suffice it to say that A.P. clearly has not spent much more than superficial time with pot smokers or has solely been exposed to “stoners”.  Personally, stoners don’t bother me, but I can understand how the stereotype of the lazy, listless pothead might hold water with someone unacquainted to that scene or its denizens.

But that’s all well and good, and I’d prefer not to go on.  The legalization debate is much like the religious one.  No one wins.  No minds are changed.  The entire debacle proves to be one monumental waste of time, and we must hope only that time will eventually allow logic and tolerance to gain a foothold in this most illogical and intolerant world.  It is to my detriment that I either initiate or get dragged into many of these debates, and I suppose I am the instigator in this case.

The second issue to which A.P. made reference that I’d like to address is my insistence on bashing conservatives.  For the most part, I mean the Republicans and roughly half of each libertarian.  To say the Republican Party is braindead is to put it most delicately.  To say that the GOP is bat-shit crazy might be a dangerous underestimation.

However, I will admit to speaking generally, and I do not mean to make the blanket statements that all conservatives are uneducated hillbillies with little care for the rest of the world.  As it seems to me that American Patriot — while grossly misguided on certain issues in my own estimation — is not one such person, I hereby tender any necessary apologies.  I must also express my disappointment that the word “patriotism” has been hijacked and made to mean nothing more than blind, flag-bleeding obedience to nationalism and principles of Manifest Destiny.  If there is a seed of suspicion in me about the wiles of our good A.P., it comes only due to the choice of moniker.  One cannot be sure that people mean words as they were originally intended or as their [the words'] current bastardizations imply.

And what the hell.  Here’s the final answer regarding your critique of my Patton post, American Patriot.  You’re right that I meander and fall off track.  I’ll be the first one to admit as much, but as for my criticism of the speech itself, I did not necessarily mean to belittle it wholesale.  I disagree fervently, and I realize that it was made under duress, as you said, like a football coach might try to pump his team up before a big game (though the stakes were obviously much higher in Patton’s case).  I suppose reading Patton’s words on that day reminded me too much of the Dick Cheney and Glenn Beck camp, and while Cheney is a sociopath and Beck is a witless boob, you cannot deny their influence on people, which is why I bring them up in the first place.

Trust me, it’s my considered opinion that the likes of FoxNews conservative pundits bear no weight whatsoever on the actual political dialogue, but that opinion, as much as I might like to believe it, probably isn’t accurate.  Yellow journalism is the running intellectual currency these days, A.P., and if I speak too generally about conservatives, it is only because most of those I know (again, not quite all) or speak with spout the same deranged horseshit I hear coming from the O’Reilly people and the Hannity people and any others you want to put in the same boat.

I will say that O’Reilly was right about one thing — and, Jesus, how it pains me to write those words.  We are in a culture war right now, and much of it boils down to whether I’m on the side that wants America to be a citizen of the world or on the side that wants to see the rise of the American Empire.  The other conversations you and I might have if we were sitting in a room together are only peripheral subjects compared to this central conflict.

That scares me and — to put it bluntly — pisses me off.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” Gen. George S. Patton

I was stumbling around the internet when I happened across the full text of Gen. George Patton’s famous speech to the Third Army.  My memory is a bit fuzzy, but up until about fifteen minutes ago, my only knowledge of this oratory marvel came from anecdotes and the film Patton starring George C. Scott.

In truth, it was nothing I didn’t expect.  Patton crammed enough violent imagery and profanity into that address as humanly possible and spoke with the hyperbolic sense of patriotism one expects from a general in the United States Army.  Don’t misconstrue my words, please.  There isn’t anything wrong with patriotism, and indeed, it is to be commended when applied rationally, but patriotic sentiment was monopolized long ago by a contingent of people who seem unable to grasp loving one’s country without full-blown militaristic zeal.  To this demographic, patriotism is synonymous with imperialism and typified by the very hubris that has become a de facto substitute for foreign policy.  The practice was, by no means, instituted by George W. Bush as many would have us believe (though he did proliferate it with glee), and despite Barack Obama’s ascension to power, one can only hope that he will keep his sensibilities logical and refrain from applying the mask of entitlement under which many Americans appear to operate.  In general, presidents tend to receive a great deal of undue glory from their respective constituencies, and the last one who really deserved any such accolades was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We’ll see if Obama’s pragmatism manages to overcome knee-jerk reactions.  His disingenuous handling of marijuana-related questions at last month’s internet town hall meeting not only risked alienating a large swath of his supporters but exemplified the power of stagnation over progress in American political culture and reinforced the notion that even he — our supposed beacon of change — is not immune to caving in to the pressures of the Game.  The only thing to be said in his defense is that (at least in that clip) he never says he is closed to the notion of decriminalizing marijuana, simply that it would not be a strategy that would benefit our struggling economy.  I don’t personally agree with his views, but I will say that those watching this broadcast deserved more than a dismissive remark delivered through a smirk.

But I was talking about Patton, wasn’t I?  I seem to remember something about that, but who can remember anything for more than a few seconds in the Age of Twitter?

For those of you who didn’t click the first link to read Patton’s speech in it’s entirety, here are a few of my favorite tidbits from it:

“Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.”

“Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards.”

We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cock suckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.”

And then comes the striking and admittedly brilliant crescendo:

You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON’T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, ‘Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.’ No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, ‘Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a- Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton!’

These words were given to the Third Army in secret somewhere in England on June 5, 1944, and I should think they would have to be delivered in a much similar way today to avoid a publicity crisis.  No comparable display of machismo and American arrogance could publicly survive the media blitz that would be sure to follow, and rightly so.  In 1944, this type of rhetoric might have been acceptable, and not to say that foreign affairs and policy matters weren’t nuanced back then, but politics in the 21st century will require a great deal more grace.

Granted, Gen. Patton was speaking to a group of soldiers and not to a room full of reporters or politicians, but perhaps it is for this reason that his speech is even more worrying.  This type of patriotism is the norm among conservatives these days, and as hard as it is to swallow the blaring and dangerous political rhetoric coming from the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, most of us would probably cringe to hear what they say behind closed doors (assuming they believe their own horseshit).

This is not, of course, to place the blame solely on conservatives for relying on flagbleeding euphamisms.  It is only fair to blame much of the liberal movement’s willingness to pander to the lowest common denominator — the ilk that see the American Flag not so much as a symbol of freedom, liberty, or virtue but as an approval stamp, a ringing endorsement of whatever policies those who invoke it support.  Such willingness to rally behind a symbol rather than an ideal or a set of ideals, no matter with which members of the punditry you align, is what makes true discourse in the political sphere so rare, and it all filters back to the inherent machismo we associate with being American.  We’re the biggest, strongest, most powerful nation on the planet.  We will be, anyway, until China pushes through to the other end of their industrial revolution and the United States comes down with a bad case of what can only be described as international penis envy.

Most of us are not rooted in or befallen by the pathological Superiority Complex that Patton exhibits in his speech.  Brilliant general though he was, Patton was also wonky enough to believe he was a reincarnated Carthaginian who had once fought against the Roman Army.  So we should take his comments with a grain of salt.  His speech is not the ravings of a mad man.  It’s much worse than that.  Patton’s speech is a word-for-word translation into military terms of what many Americans likely believe today.  They might not express it in the blood-and-guts tradition like our good general, but the reptilian world view that stresses the oversimplified dynamics of Good vs. Evil and Us vs. Them is both prevalent and well-defined. Like Patton, there are those out there whose idea of a Great American is the apish infantry grunt, spiteful of the enemy and willing to charge into a cloud of bullets without asking why, instead thinking only that it is what a brave man would do.  Just peruse the comment board under Patton’s speech at Free Republic.

Gen. George Patton is who qualifies as a Great American, and perhaps he was in the most brutish sense.  He was, no doubt, a brilliant military man and an adept tactician.  The United States would not have enjoyed some of the victories it did during World War II if it weren’t for Patton, and yes, maybe I’ll even concede that he was the man for that time and place.  He was the kind of man he glorified in such fervid prose to the men of the Third Army that night in England.

And the ideal here is that we should be working toward a situation in which the glorification of blind patriotism is overruled by the sensible desire for mutuality and peace between countries and not push for a system that maintains American superiority.  The challenges we will face in the very near future demand that we not draw alliances based on such arbitrary things as geographic boundaries.  We must attempt to see eye-to-eye with the rest of the world — holding our ground, of course, when necessary — and compromise with instead of impose upon them our own set of core values.  We need to protect ourselves.  Naturally, this is true, and only a woefully naive person would say otherwise, but the best thing we can do is ditch our Old World mentalities.  The real ideal here is that we move forward into a world that will never need another Gen. George Patton.

I can’t claim a truly deep knowledge of the troubled governor’s tenure in Illinois politics.  I know the bullet points (none of them are good), and I’ve listened to his half-cocked justifications for the “Free Rides for Seniors” program that would have further crippled an already atrocious budget by allowing senior citizens to ride the CTA buses without paying.  It was a futile effort to save face in front of a constituency bearing almost unanimous disgust for him.  I certainly know enough to consider him one of the most acidic politicians in my consciousness.  He is marked by a savage ambition to fuck over anyone who stands in his way and a willingness to sell any political assets necessary to further his own standing.  His management is inept, and his self-image is a cohort of grandiose delusions imbued with narcissistic rage.  Thirteen-percent approval rating be damned.

Simply put, he is the definition of scum.

So his attempts to literally sell Barack Obama’s now-vacant U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder should come as no surprise to anyone even tangentially aware of Blagojevich’s history as a failed politician.  We’re used to it out here.  From the Daleys to former governor George Ryan and now Blagojevich, the expectation is that our politicians are embedded mobsters or serial prostitute killers, and yes, even sometimes good, old-fashioned municipal despots looking to run a burn on the citizens before slinking back into the woodpile.

I’ve read the charges against Blagojevich, and I plan on paging through a decent portion of the FBI affidavit before tackling my nightmares.  The details are almost too sordid to reiterate just now before I steer my car into this blizzard and head for home, but if you want to read something that sounds like a bad John Grisham novel, you’d do well to just skim the Associated Press article.  Reading even a couple of those wiretapped quotes is enough to seal the deal in my head.  (The only secret recordings I might want to hear more are the old Nixon tapes.)  No governor or politician has the slightest excuse to say these things, and when all is said and done, I hope Blagojevich goes down for every charge levied against him.  He should spend the next twenty years dry-cleaning prison uniforms in a penitentiary for what he’s done to the State of Illinois and its people, and the way things are looking at the moment, he just might.

Never trust the kingmakers of this world.

In the meantime, Newsweek has released a series of articles entitled Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, which is a kitschy title.  Nonetheless, the behind-the-scenes reportage is some of the best campaign journalism since Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Newsweek is a largely mediocre source of news, but every now and then they put out a smashmouth piece of honest journalism.  This is one of those.

I think that’s a damn good quote.  It’s catchy and true, and I’m friends with the man who said it.  All good reasons that it’s been stuck in my head for a week or two.

There is a sad lining to these words, though, because the truth is that neither Obama nor McCain have the slightest idea how to fix this economy.  They can debate about foreign policy all they want.  Those decisions will be made by nameless white men behind a massive smokescreen that, as far as I can tell, has been hiding this country’s policy rats since the establishment of the FBI.  And it will work the same way with the economy.

The president is and always has been an overstated role in the government.  Anyone who’s taken a high school level government class knows that much, and all the empty promises rocketing out of both candidates” mouths will fall upon barren soil.  Every.  Single.  One.  The Commander in Chief is nothing more than a glorified notary public–an executive pen wielder and patsy for those who make the real decisions.  Obama might not realize this now, still drunk on his rockstar status, though it has been significantly eroded since this crazy horseshit merry-go-round started almost two years ago, but he is going to be a shill when he takes office.  The special interests, Democratic party heavies, and a host of bitter rivals on Capitol Hill will make sure of that.  Hell. Tony Rezko might even make a few calls from his prison cell (READ: Caribbean resort) just to make sure all is going according to plan.

And it will be.

Sure.  He doesn’t know the first thing about the economy.  Neither does John McCain.  But with all the pitfalls that stand in the way of his [Obama's] success, there isn’t a whole lot to worry about, especially not since the Dow’s staggering losses just before the markets closed today.  The stock market has lost almost 40% of its value in one year, and most of us, I think, should feel that we’re closing in on the bottom.  It can’t get much worse.  The only things left to lose are our jobs.

Perhaps I’m overstating the severity of the situation, but I can’t help feeling that this is the necessary medicine for years of adherence to free market capitalism, which really means very simply that a lack of oversight and general ignorance on the part of everyday Americans will allow moneymen and executives on Wall Street to plunder the piggy bank on a national scale and bring about a dangerous, destabilizing misappropriation of wealth.  Trickle down economics has failed.  Once and for all.  Let us never consider it again.

What really and truly confuses me, though, is what people hear from Barack Obama that sounds much different from the rest of the politicians.  His policies certainly weren’t much different from Hillary Clinton’s, and anyone who watched even one of those lame, free-for-all Democratic primary debates knows that Obama edged her out solely on the basis of likability.  But seriously.  I wouldn’t be railing on Obama if he hadn’t sold himself as the New Hope, the man with spare Change in his pocket.  He could have either surprised me by following through on his word, or he could have spared me the letdown.  Then again, I was foolish to have the small modicum of hope that I did when this whole thing started out.

In the last month, I’ve heard negative campaigning, political attack ads, and numerous vagaries meant to parry inconvenient lines of questioning.  I’ve heard it from both candidates, and the election is now as mundane as any I’ve seen.  Same.  Old.  Shit.

And it makes me wonder—yes, we’re coming upon my hidden gist here–why people are so reticent to support a third-party or independent candidate.  There is the argument that you’re throwing a vote away, right into the river or Lake Michigan if you’re from Chicago.  What if, though, people voted for the candidate they truly wanted—the one that hits all the right points and tickles all those fuzzy places inside, whatever they may be and whichever way they might lean.  You’d have at least four major candidates, and truth is the only reason we don’t is that the whole “throwing your vote away” hogwash re-instills the impossibility.

It works just like our current economic crisis.  People panic, and they’re afraid.  They sell their stocks and make a bad situation worse.  Except this time, we’re not selling our stocks.  We’re selling off (cheaply) our free will and our power to make our own decisions.  We’ve let ourselves be pigeonholed into the D’s and R’s that appear next to our politicians’ names, and we are paying for it every single day.

That’s why the Iraq War happened.  It’s why the stock market crashed today.  It’s why we feel helpless and complain that our voices are not heard in our state and national capitals.  It’s because we don’t hold anyone accountable for what they do.  We just bitch and moan while they do it, and the biggest change most of us ever think to make is switching from D to R or vice versa as if it would do any good.