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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: We lose.
"crappy inventions" "everybody's an authority" "Steve Fauntelroy milk" "words that rhyme with eleven" "threw the clock out the window just to see time fly" "whores at Christmas" "Rothschild whine" "history of Bush presidential lies" |
11.03.2004
I had originally planned a lengthy tirade, a thing of bitter bile and threats, but I haven't got the energy or the resolve. I'm certainly sad to disappoint, but I ain't no hard man. After that I had planned a challenge: a letter to the liberals, asking what we were supposed to do now; a letter to the conservatives, asking what they intended to due when the non-'moral issues' part of the bill comes due. But nobody reads this blog. No one's listening. If the election taught us anything, it taught us the meaning of "words full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". The lefty blogs, well-intentioned all and plenty a cracking good read, are just talking to themselves; they're preaching to the choir, and not only is the choir drowned out by the rival choir from the fundamentalist choir across the street, but half of them didn't bother to show up on Sunday to sing. As far as the right, they certainly aren't reading this. I have nothing to say to them, anyway. I've said it all before and I'm bone-weary of trying to convince the willfully ignorant. I don't feel like posing the challenge, and despite the confidence everyone seems determined to exude in the face of this defeat, I don't think anyone has the answers to it anyway. Then I planned a lament, a cry for what's been lost and what's going to be lost, but you've heard it all before. Half of you will call me a whiner, half of you will call me a hysteric, and one or two of you who agree with me will just nod and move on because you already know this stuff. So I just decided to quit talking. To fucking shut up for once. To take the day off and do some thinking, to try and figure things out. To understand what will be required of me in the future, personally and politically. To learn my responsibilities and my options. To figure out what it means when people say I have to keep fighting (for what? how? and what if I keep losing?), and why, at the same time, I feel like giving up while simultaneously feeling like I'll die fighting rather than surrender. To assess what is important to me and how I'm going to get it, and what I'm going to do without it if I can't. To stop listening to other people, to stop making other people listen to me, to just sit and think and speculate about the kind of future I'm going to have and the kind of place I'm going to have it in. Sorry about this. Reading it's done none of you any good, and I hope you haven't. Back to the funny tomorrow, when I'm feeling capable again. Once again and it can't be said enough, I'm eternally grateful to any of you who put up with me. America is not a place: it has never been a place. It is an idea, and it travels with you. Give up on the people if you feel the need; they're people just like any other. Give up on the place, if you must; it's a wonderful place, beautiful and satisfying, and I have never seen its like, but it is just a place. But don't let go of the idea. We made the idea, and we can do anything we want with it, regardless of other people's notions of what it should be. That's the real strength of America: it can be anywhere, even with one man alone in a room, anywhere in the world. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Above all things, be not made an ass to carry the burdens of other men: if any man desire thee to be his surety, give him a part of what thou hast to spare; if he presses thee further, he is not thy friend at all, for friendship rather chooseth harm to itself than offereth it." (Sir Walter Raleigh) |