My Left Side Just Went Numb

Is this the big one? Am I finally about to cash in all those Big Macs in a stupefying display of cardiac pyrotechnics wherein my poor twitching heart breaks open within my chest and issues forth gelatinous clots of industrial-grade cholesterol the consistency of expanding foam insulation?

No, fortunately I'm not having a heart attack--at least not yet. I'm merely experiencing a violent psychosomatic reaction to the apparently unstoppable encroachment of the pernicious Right. Nor am I the only one feeling the chill of impending conservatism. The fiber has been a-thrum for the last two days with the reactions of liberal and moderate bloggers as we all attempt to process the lunacy which we must, perforce, accept as fact: The White House has been denied us, Congress is stacked against us, and, with the likely abdication of Rehnquist, even the judiciary will be closed to us. Responses have ranged far and wide. Some are still nestled in the gentle embrace of denial. Their cries of "Fraud!" and "Investigation!" will no doubt echo long through the luminiferous ether. Others say that the war is over, that we should gather our dead and our dying and make for the hills while we may. The future of America, they seem to say, is someone else's problem. From still others--with whom I do not intend in any way to disagree--we hear the drums of doom ringing out the approach of pervasive theocracy and the demise of personal liberties. And do you know what, children? They're all right.

But for those of us who are left to pick up the pieces of our democracy and make shift for the future, neither of these outlooks is of much practical value. The first two are inherently without strategy--or hope--for redemption and the latter reeks of defeatism and begs one essential question: "So what do we do about it?" Let's take first the die-hard foul-criers. These are dedicated, stolid men and women who have stepped gamely to the plate to say what we're all thinking. The fact is, there is no way that we're ever going to know for sure whether or not there was any sort fraud involving the machinery--literal and figurative--of this election. Our tendency, bred of pattern recognition and a conditioned mistrust of those who control our political system, is to assume the worst. So let's play pretend for a moment. Let's pretend that, through unparalleled devotion to the truth, we spend the next weeks, months, and years pouring over the ever-cooling informational spoor trail left behind by Election Day '04. Let us, for simplicity's sake, disregard the fact that the electoral system is fundamentally engineered so as to make it difficult to keep track of absentee ballots, provisional ballots, and the increasingly prevalent "misplaced" voter registrations. Let us also disregard the fact that the mechanical logistics of the electronic voting system make it difficult if not damned near impossible to trace--or even perceive--vote fraud, let alone to prove conclusively that it occurred. All of these provisions taken, let's then say that we have accomplished our mission. Through our relentless efforts, we manage to lever back a tiny corner of the system and expose the whirring gunmetal watchworks of a vast Right-wing conspiracy machine. We have now in our hands proof incontrovertible that George W. Bush has usurped the leadership of this nation.

Now what? Who, honestly, gives a fuck? We more or less established that this is precisely what Bush and his henchmen did four years ago. Only a handful of people recognized that proof, and most of them didn’t really care. Sure, “Remember Florida” became a slick little leftist masturbation chant, but no one really gave a damn. Why should we think that this year—with its even higher margin of victory and groundswell of fundamentalist religious support--would see us meet with any greater success?

Ok, so what about the trumpeters of destruction, knelling the death of the American way? They are, I am very much afraid, accurate in their forecasts. Look at the facts. First, morality and values have become the watchwords of our “objective” media. In and of themselves, all fine and good. The catch is that these morals and values are cemented to the fundaments of Christianity, a religion, I am sorry to have to inform you conservative readers, which is not representative of the beliefs of the entire populace of the United States. Even so, I will be the first to admit that there exist in Christianity tenets which are fine and noble, and would moreover make exemplary keystones to social policy; these include the respecting of one’s fellow man, the praise and reward of generosity and kindness, and intolerance toward murder and cruelty. The problem occurs when the ruling party attempts to use their power to impose not just these admirable social rules upon the citizenry, but the sum and body of fundamental Christian doctrine as well. This is not only a clear violation of my—supposedly—constitutionally protected right to practice (or not) nay religion I choose, but also translates into an imposition on my other—again, supposed—American freedoms (take equal protection under the law, for instance: the legal statutes that allow me, as a heterosexual, to marry whomever I choose so long as the individual has reached the age of majority and is not a sanguine relation do not, in an increasing number of locations, apply to homosexuals. This is as clear a violation of the tenets of social equality as was that famous bus driver’s insistence that Rosa Parks take to the back of the bus, and I dare anyone to tell me otherwise). So the storm crows out there in Blog-Land shriek to us about how the religious Right are going to use their new-found political dominance to shore up their pro-Christian moral code cum legal code, and that *gasp* they will no doubt try to shove their well-meaning little tentacles ever deeper into the fabric of our supposedly tolerant society, so that those of us who survive the next few years are going to wake up in a thriving, bustling theocracy led by a man who, despite bearing a distracting resemblance to certain tree-dwelling primates, considers himself to be God’s go-to guy on earth.

To these people I am forced to say: “No Shit!?” Yes, all of these things are likely to come to pass, and yes, they were likely inevitable from the beginning; if you hadn’t anticipated this nasty little turn of events, if you hadn’t gotten an inkling long ago that our leaders were more than willing to so thoroughly force their own personal religious code upon us citizens as to render citizenship intolerable—or even hazardous—to any who don’t hold the appropriate (read: their) beliefs, then we, my friends, are in deeper proverbial fecal matter than I thought.

As to the final group, the ones whose answer to America’s problems is flight, I don’t really blame you. You’ve got good reason to be afraid, and to flee is the first and most immediate response to fear. But, as appealing as that notion is, someone has to clean up this mess. We’re going to need every mind, ever voice, and perhaps, eventually, every pair of hands to set this place to rights. If we up and abandon this nation, our nation, into the hands of people like ol’ George, then we’ve failed, and we will have deserved that failure. No, my friends and neighbors—and I think all of us know this somewhere way down in the bottom of our bleeding little liberal hearts—there’s a lot of good in this country, a lot that’s worth fighting for. If we have to make an intellectual war of it, then so be it. Hell, if blog posts were bullets, we’d never lose. But one way or another, we need to stop cowering in our individual caves and holes in the sand and stand together. Whatever we say, it must be uttered in one voice: by air, by fiber optic, by paper, or by glyphs carved of soap, if that’s what it takes. We can no longer expect to achieve our ends by responding in the traditional ways (which for bloggers generally means furious link-swapping and semantic in-fighting, whilst the world spins on). What the established powers that be do not credit, and what we ourselves do not yet seem to realize, is that at the epicenter of this maelstrom of words and memes, there resides a force unrivaled in the history of human communication, a 100-million-megaton warhead of sheer intellectual ass-kicking the like of which no one has ever witnessed, and against which not even the prodigious powers of ignorance can stand.

But as long as we keep arguing amongst ourselves, thirty million blind men debating the nature of an elephant, we can never put it to use. While you think about that, keep in mind that in all probability, there exists at this very minute, somewhere out in the uncharted wilds of Blogtopia, the future leader of this little island of dirt.

Right this minute, he or she is probably camping in a Star Trek chatroom, scarfing Ramen noodles by the forkful and listening to a Rush mix tape.

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Just in case you find this needlessly grim, I’ll leave you with some parting wisdom from Homer Simpson which should go a long way toward making you feel better:

“Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out again.”