So the United States will be spending another four years locked into a paranoid nightmare where logic and reason cease to function, and the very idea that there might exist an objective reality or truth is shat upon by foaming political mullahs who value only loyalty and blind obedience in a way that makes one think it wouldn't be so bad if the machines took over, not so bad at all...
What does Canada make of this?
News flash: George Bush is still as popular up there as pustulent gonorrhea, and he's dribbling all over our the few pissy scraps remaining of our country's reputation. He is so reviled, in fact, that the White House is currently thinking it would be a bad idea for him to address Parliament when he visits Ottawa at the end of the month...As it would be bad publicity if he were heckled.
No final decision has been made, but those involved with the planning of the visit (Nov. 30 and Dec. 1) want to avoid pictures on U.S. network television of a president being booed or shouted at as he embarks on a second term seeking warmer ties with allies who had cooled toward his administration.
In fact, the Prime Minister was forced to expel MP Carolyn Parrish from the Liberal caucus for her most outspoken Bush-hatery. She has been something of a critic of Bush in the past, and said a few undiplomatic things in the wake of the election. I certainly understand and even share her sentiments; I hate damn American bastards too. But perhaps she was a little blunt, a little gauche, when she stomped on a George Bush action figure on an episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes and then told the Prime Minister to 'go to hell'. Hating the bastards in private is one thing, but that's just silly. That's the sort of thing one expects of a blogger, not a Member of Parliament.
And that's in Canada; you know how passive-aggressive they usually are. Just imagine what the French are saying about us...
Behold another miracle of the Information Age: the MASSIVE database, with information on over 1700 songs about mathematics and the sciences. And links to the lyrics of many. It seems as if there ought to be more Tom Lehrer numbers, though...But perhaps I'm on crack. As the saying goes.
The new apartment still has not burned down. This is going very well indeed.
Someone just threw an egg at my living-room window from a passing car.
Last night, I dreamt I was trapped in a space capsule with Gene Wolfe and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in a circumlunar orbit. It was pretty comfortable, as space capsules go; there was a wet bar. Mr Wolfe was pounding his cane on the capsule floor and demanding that Mr Nielsen Hayden immediately pilot us onto a collision course with the Earth...
In other, less sleepy, news, I have a home again. This one is absolutely totally not on fire, not even a bit. Believe me, I've checked. The damage to my books seems to be largely confined to soot on the covers, which wipes right off; sometimes the edges of the pages have absorbed a little of the stuff, and I'm not quite sure how to go about removing it without destroying the book, but this is a minor issue. I fear the dust jackets of some of the hardcovers may be beyond hope. Everything is still perfectly readable, though.
Unfortunately, the presidential election was not just some kind of horrible nightmare. Although when one learns that Alberto 'Torture Memo' Gonzales has been nominated to replace 'Crisco Johnny' Ashcroft as Attorney General of the United States of America, one begins to suspect that the line between nightmare and reality is becoming strangely blurred...
And for that, I, like millions of other Americans, am very and truly sorry.
There was a brief time when John Kerry and his campaign had managed to kindle in me a tiny little flicker of faith in the essential decency and sense of the American system and people. This is now dead. A majority of Americans are not moved by facts or by truth or by reason. A majority have gone for fags and flags. I have said it before and it remains true: George Bush and his Republican fellows have a deeply pathological relationship to the truth, and appeal to the most barbaric, divisive, and fundamentally unjust aspects of the American psyche. They are artists in the media of hate and fear. That is not going to change. If anything, this new mandate will make it all worse. Now they know their scaremongering works.
Eleven states last night passed measures enshrining into law discrimination against gay people--my people; the only social or cultural or demographic or whatever group to which I have ever felt any sense of belonging. Even Oregon. I expected it of the South, and I expected it of Utah; but Oregon? The irony of Christians demonising people for experiencing and showing love is not lost on me, but it's also not remotely funny. It is toxic, poisonous. And ultimately futile; as the last four years have shown, no matter what happens, the clock cannot be turned back. We are, as they say, still here, and still queer, and people must still get used to it. Though it may, as last night showed, take some of them rather longer than one might hope, it will still happen. The powers arrayed against us are ultimately doomed; yet they are still formiddable.
But we are on the side of the angels.