My Dearest Colleagues in the Struggle,

Like all good little hippie boys, I got politically radicalized in the Sixties. I realized that our wonderful, God-ordained, perfect U.S. of A. consistently fell short of its aspirations. It was a gut-level awakening, not the result of some sophisticated research and development on my part. It broke my heart.

Actually, I made the mistake of watching what the politicians did, instead of what they said, and that was fatal. Yeah. As it always has been.

There are no mainstream political parties that I feel at home with. I find even the most moderate (WTF? What is a ‘moderate’?) Republicans repugnant on a genetic level. Democrats at least mouth the words I want to hear. Then they sell out or chicken out. I don’t know or care anymore whether they actually ever meant the things they said while trying to get their own room in the palace at Versailles-on-the-Potomac.

The real system we have in place is deliberately designed to run off, destroy, or corrupt anyone who wants to actually further the ideals enshrined in our Constitution.

I bailed out. I didn’t vote, not once, until the 2002 elections. All I saw was a lose/lose game, and I decided early on to not play it. I watched things crumble around me with a certain narcissistic smugness.

Then Caroline and Jessica made me feel all guilty and citizen-y and responsible and politically aware again. They’re both hot babes, and I’ve always been compliant with the hot babes.

I started surfing the netroots blogs. It was a comfort at first. I realized that I wasn’t merely insane – things were indeed getting incredibly worse incredibly quickly. And I wasn’t the only one who saw it. I wasn’t alone.

I now read political news and blogs on the webs for at least two hours a day. I can discourse in detail on damn near every scandal, outrage, cop-out, conspiracy, treasonous act, fuck-up, and smear campaign perpetrated by the assholes on both the Left and the Right — mostly the Right — since about 1990.

It’s a rolling carnival of unending horrors. We’ve officially disowned damn near all of the paperwork our Founding Fathers signed off on to try to keep us from becoming Caligula’s Rome. You won’t sneer at my comparing us with that particular decadent empire, after we’ve had another generation of the two-tier economy in place, the one where there are the wealthy, and there are the peasants, and no one else between, and nobody gives a shit what happens to the peasants.

I’ve vibrated between Wrath at the spoilers, and Despair for my country, for almost all of this new century.

I’m tired of it, and I’m done with it.

: Read More »