DAZE OF OUR LIVES

Every cloud has a silver lining! That would be the lightning. The sky's the limit! The sky is poison and full of holes. Prosperity is just around he corner. Prosperity is a gated community. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And terrorists and tyrants. Every man a king! Speak for yourself, Rex. It is a new dawn for America! How about some of those old dawns, the ones when we still had a Bill of Rights? There's no stopping us now! That's sort of what we're afraid of. Hope is on the way! Hope you've got some kind of plan, Stan. A shining city on a hill! Poor people need not apply. One nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. Leave God out of this, it wasn't His idea to abolish the right to a Writ of Habeus Corpus.

And so it goes in these days of political conventions, where we suspend belief on the one hand and bite the other hand that feeds us fairy tales. You try to check your cynicism at the door but to get to the door you've just had to wade knee-deep through piles of horse exhaust. So you ask questions when our political leaders gather together and anoint a guy as a Messiah to fix all the problems they had a huge hand in creating. Like he's going to wave a magic wand when he's president and stop Congressmen and Senators from loading every law that passes their desks with more pork than a sausage factory. They ask the rest of us to believe that they will keep their word about working together when you know that once the guy's elected they're going to go back to being part of the problem and making his life miserable.

We have ourselves today history in our hands, a black man nominated for the Presidency by a major party, a brilliant and capable man to be sure, but in the end but a man, possessed of no magical qualities and no powers to huff and puff and blow our problems away. That would take cooperation from the two Houses of Congress, those same two houses who have loaded legislation for emergency funding for both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina with earmarks. When unprecedented national disasters don't prevent you from bellying up to the buffet table of the national treasury, well, don't go all Abe Lincoln on us at the convention, taking about unity, personal responsibility and constructive dialogue. The same two houses of Congress who didn't have to the nerve to defy a complete moron of a president for the past 8 years. And we're supposed to believe them, why?

And the other party, wow! They're even more delusional, nominating a senile old war hero in the hopes that people will elect him because he's not a black guy, and sadly, with decent prospects to succeed. At a time when you'd think no one gives a good crap what color anybody is, well, they do. Never mind that the senile old guy nominates his wife to join a biker gang's wet T-shirt contest, forgets how many luxurious homes he owns and doesn't know his geography, he's the one to lead us out of the nightmare he helped create. How does that work, exactly? The Republicans want you to believe that the guy who voted 95% of the time this past year according to the wishes of our worst president ever is now all of a sudden going to restore the factory settings to America. Maybe we were born at night, but it wasn't last night.

The fact is, though, that the next president is going to pretty much be as busy as one-armed piano player cleaning up the godawful mess left by Bush The Younger. Now that we realize way too late that electing mildly retarded puppet presidents is not the way to go, just maybe we could persuade the rest of our elected representatives that they've got to man the brooms and buckets too. They've got to ask themselves just how dumb they acted to screw up a place as cool as America. That's not easy, you know, it took a lot of effort to fuck up on such an epic scale. Dumbya didn't do that alone, the Congress killed more than their share of the golden goose and slopped the gravy all over themselves and us too.

Don't make our first black president a janitor, at least not the only one. Half these jokers getting up to praise the man as our savior are a huge part of the reason we need a savior in the first place. After November, butt-smoke blowing time is over and the reality will be that America needs to be fixed and it's not a one-man job. So get the high-mineded rhetoric out of your system now and come next January, either be prepared to help or stand aside and let others do what you were afraid to do; stand up and fight for what is ours.