Oh the horrors if the old school reactionary thugs take over the government again after tomorrow's election. We're dooooooomed! Well yes and no. I mean it's not like we haven't been here before. Remember the ghosts in the Gulf of Tonkin that were manufactured to justify over 50,000 of our guys copping it in Viet Nam? You know, the same kind of thinking that quietly shifted from the WMD's that weren't there to oh heavens no we really attacked so we could start building a great democracy in the Middle East all of a sudden.
But just think of all the great art, music and writing that was created when the America First Bozos were in office (from one Party or the other; what exactly was the difference between Johnson and Bush II again?) and the MO of American life was conformity and a kind of redneck populist statis.
I think the truth is we don't actually do very well when "in power." The Lunatic fringe shouldn't be in the Halls of Power; not because we're a threat to anything, but because our creativity suffers.
If we don't have a great evil monolith to rave against we falter a bit. It's hard to create anti-establishment art when you ARE the establishment. It's the bane of critics everywhere.
When the kind of people the Tea Party and Neocons support are in power there is no end to miscues, wrong-headed policies, foreign adventures, jingoisms, self-serving outright lies, and American Empire craziness.
That kind of target rich environment is exactly what we've been lacking the past couple of years. Where are the great works of conscience, reason, and challenge since President Obama was elected? No where. All we have is Uncle Buck and Aunt Flo shaking it up over immigrants, Muslims and gays (oh my)***.
We need certain kinds of white bread, lackluster, manipulative hypocrites in positions of power in order to function as the true outsider conscience, the existential lunatic embodied in the guerrilla theater of the mind, and so forth whatever. And when we don't have that, we stagnate.
So though the country probably takes a big swing to the Loonycons tomorrow (mostly because - face it - liberals just don't know how to fight) there is a silver lining in that descending Dark Age.
The Revolution will be back in business!
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*** - yes, I shamelessly stole that.
