First, entertainment: dead whales can and do explode. Watch yourself. Oh! I know! Perhaps all those weapons of mass destruction that aren't in Iraq are hidden inside the bodies of sea mammals! On Mars! Yeah...That has to be it.
Second, a pointless observation: I'm thankful that I wasn't born in the Middle Ages. If I'd lived past infancy, I probably would've become a monk. The constant sodomy would've been okay, but how much would it have sucked when the Church finally set me on fire? A lot. That's how much.
Third, despair. Teflon Tony is still Prime Minister of the UK, the Hutton Report was a tremendous let-down, and, as the Flaming Lips sang, evil will prevail. It's hard to imagine a lamer and more unsatisfying end to the inquiry...Once again it's all lick, lick, lick the testicles of the Powerful. Authority figures should never be given the benefit of the doubt. They should be relentlessly criticised and second-guessed and suspected at all times. Or else they'll squash us like bugs. Hutton should've gotten at least a little crosser with the government; gosh knows there are grounds enough and then some. But no. No, no. All we get is that insufferably assy jackass Alastair Campbell strutting around like a giant cock ejaculating insufferably assy smugness everywhere he goes. Oo, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
So good old authoritarian Tony Blair still reigns with his iron fist, and iron heel, and other iron things as well, except for his heart, which is very much not iron but weak and frail flesh, now clotted and sick with his accumulated evil and no doubt soon to explode much like that poor whale.
Not that the US looks any rosier right now. We are still living on the very mouth of Hell, from which horrid daemoniackal beasts like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld crawl with fiendish plots to drag all of Earth down into their nether pits of hellish torment. And there is no Buffy to save us. I had such high hopes for Howard Dean; he would've been a great Buffy. He actually had the guts to make true statements, like that capturing Saddam Hussein didn't make America any safer. Which any fool can see is true. Even the Homeland Security people. Remember the Orange Alert thing? Damn right you do. But Dean looks pretty much dead now; first Iowa, then New Hampshire, now it seems his campaign is somehow, bizarrely, insanely, out of all that shimmery green cash it had raised, and his polls have plunged, and he's apparently sacked that Mr Trippi who masterminded his great leap to frontrunnerdom...It's a right dog's breakfast, and no mistake. And my new love, Wesley Clark, hasn't been capturing the spotlight as he should...Those were the two candidates I had real enthusiasm for. Because they didn't vote for the Iraq war. Or the Patriot Act. They didn't bend over, like the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress, and allow George Bush's pustulent, unlubricated dick to violate the tenderest, delicate buds of the American ideal. As an extremely cross and worried man filled with a sick disgust at the future this administration is carving out for what, for better or for worse, is still my country, that counts for a lot.
I have a grudge against Iowa. A new one, I mean. Besides the ones I hold due to growing up there. I am giving Iowa baleful glares from afar for voting for the candidates who weren't my favourites and spoiling all my glorious Deany dreams.
At this point, I am officially tired of the primaries. I know this is going to sound petulant and childish, but if the nominee isn't going to be Dean and it isn't going to be Clark, then I don't particularly care which of the serious candidates gets it. Fundamentally, I don't much care what any of their policy proposals are, so long as they involve not being Bush. There isn't all that much variation between them, all more or less centrist, and it isn't as if, faced with an implacably hostile, mean-spirited, and vicious Republican majority in Congress, any of their progressive proposals would make it through in any case. There are, as I see it, precisely two goals one should realistically have for a Democratic president right now: stopping the Republicans from doing any more damage, and rallying the troops to achieve a more equitable balance of power in Congress in some future election, at which point we can finally realistically hope to start moving forward again in a systematic rather than piecemeal way. The President will have to be a fighter, willing to go head-to-head with Tom DeLay and endure relentlessly partisan abuse in large segments of the media. Think the Clinton impeachment meets the Al Gore campaign. That sort of treatment.
Which is not to say that the Johns Kerry and Edwards aren't up to it. I hope they are. They probably are. I just wish they'd make me feel a little more confident. I wish I could be sure that they get it.
Have I mentioned that I never watch television? (I get my Buffy and so forth on DVD. And things like Diane Sawyer's Howard Dean interview online.) I realise that this means I will never, ever fully connect with most of the American voting public. And so I have not the remotest, faintest clue which of the candidates is most likely to connect with the public and win an election. And so my opinions really mean nothing at all, and you shouldn't be reading them. In fact, you should forget you ever saw this. You should erase your memory at once with mind rubbers. It is the only way.
Oh well. At least there's still Canada. (Eat it, Tories.)
Posted by aloysius at January 29, 2004 10:08 PM | TrackBack |