T'is the day after Christmas, and all through my head, not an issue is stirring, living or dead.
I gave Doc a copy of my book for Christmas last week. I still have a box full of them - vanity lives on for years - so a few people got one. It's a core sample of the articles that were posted on the old Heller Mountain website between the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. You can still find remnants of some of those rants, like this one:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x28998
Doc is a good guy. He ran for the Arizona legislature last November as a Democrat, which means he lost, but he at least developed a pathologist's view of American politics. There is no room for discourse, at least in Arizona, he says. It bears mentioning that there is also no room for a time machine here, and for the same reason: No such thing exists.
Our beloved "discourse" consists of like-minded people screaming inside their own echo chambers. Back-and-forth dialogue, with which the Founding Fathers had hoped to replace flying lead, is in no way a part of the game anymore.
Doc shakes his head when he talks about it. He's enjoying the book, though, calling it "stream of consciousness" and comparing my work to that of Hunter S. Thompson (who committed suicide). Good enough for me.
"But you don't blog anymore," he said. It wasn't a question. I half-agreed. Very little, I told him, and that prompted Doc to ask me why.
"Because I no longer feel sorry for the American people," I said. "They're getting what they asked for." Doc absorbed that by folding his arms, frowning and nodding his head in affirmation.
Back in the day, I wrote fifteen, twenty columns a month. Every day there was something to bellow about. It seemed to me that the American people were victims of something awful that was being done to our country. I wanted to warn them.
Maybe I just wanted to be able to tell them, later, that they had been warned. Well, here we are. It brings me no joy at all to say it: I told you so... Only now, I actually consider the American people complicit in the situation at hand.
It's no secret who the bad guys are in this passion play, this winding down of our once-well-intentioned empire: Conservatives, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist and a whole host of others, wrecked this country to the point where it may not be salvageable.
In response, the public shrugged, and put the GOP back in power. Has anything changed among those people since the crumbling of the nation all those (two) years ago? If anything, they've only gotten worse - louder, dumber and uglier.
Somehow, national amnesia (or something worse) caused the electorate to restore insanity to politics. I'm supposed to feel sorry for that?
Okay. Keep checking back in this space to see if I ever lament again for the citizenry the way I did when it mattered the most. And keep checking.
Merry Christmas, Doc.
pH 12.26.1o
