Just One Last Wish. . .

Just in case you all thought I'd given up one of my favourite pastimes: "Bush-Whacking". . .

--ryan





A Liberal's Final Wish

"Hoping all who made Bush's victory possible will
someday share in his conviction, both federal and
state. . . "


By Dean Opperman [Pasadena Weekly 12/14/04]



Give me a break — or a big glass of vodka. We've gone
from shock and awe to shuck and jive, and Captain
Quagmire ran the table anyway. Now he's got the White
House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the military
and a chip on his shoulder he's calling a mandate. I
don't know about you, but I'm getting a Republican
haircut just to blend in.

For four years it's been one big all-you-can-eat
buffet for the corporations, and now they're coming
back for more. Go ahead, you marvelous bastards! Rip
out all the trees, pave the beaches, build 12-lane
freeways, plunder the treasury, destroy our future.
Cook the books, rig elections, pack the courts, hand
the regulatory agencies over to fascist maniacs.
Invade more countries, declare code red, invoke
martial law, and keep going until your oil-sucking
exploits kick off a nuclear exchange.

By God (or Diebold), you've earned it. You've
hoodwinked the evangelicals. You've threatened the
journalists. You've built a propaganda machine and
disguised it as a legitimate cable news network.
You've used it to force-feed every right wing loon
from Ashcroft to Zell down our throats until they
began to sound normal. You've used phony government
alerts to manipulate the trailer park patriots, and
you've dismantled the separation of church and state
to the point where the Stars and Stripes represents
the anti-choice, fuel-guzzling, homophobic God of the
blow-dried televangelists.

Yes, Mr. President, it's your great and lasting
legacy. You've brought brazen deceit into the
political mainstream. In fact, it wouldn't be too much
to say you are the single most credible Republican
since Dan Quayle sprayed that grey stuff on his
sideburns. And now you say you want my support. To
assume you are being sincere is in itself a
faith-based initiative, but in the spirit of fleeting
bipartisanship, I'll play along.

I pledge allegiance to the united corporations of
America. For the next four years I will continue
wearing my Nike shirt, my Adidas shoes, and my Old
Navy logo pullover. While eating my corn flakes, if I
find that I'm chewing on a coupon, I'll suppress the
thought that the corporations aren't content to have
turned me into a human billboard, they want me eating
their advertising, too.

I'll do my best to suppress my inner environmentalist.
When my conscience says things like, "Hey! Isn't that
bioengineered food you are eating?" I will assure
myself that the radioactive waste in my dental work
will kill off any cooties.

I will overlook the fact that you've done more damage
to feminism than 20 years of gangster rap, and I will
ignore the fear that we will soon need Sherpa guides
to reach the ruins of anything resembling such relics
as an eight-hour work day. I will do my best to ignore
the feeling that I've fallen into a Fellini movie by
ignoring the eyes of the old TV news anchors who,
caught up in TV's sudden shift to the right, seem to
be trying to tell us something they aren't allowed to
say on the air. I will suppress my suspicion that you
are part of the same gang of psychopaths who brought
us Enron, Vietnam and Dallas '63, and I will shelve my
theory that the best way to make a dent in terrorism
is to invade the state of Texas. And I promise not to
move to Mexico, which seems pointless anyway since it
appears to be moving to me.

Those are my concessions, Mr. President. Now I need a
few from you. I've found it hard to feel proud of
America since you first took office. I was among the
millions who were appalled when you morphed the home
of democracy into a rogue nation endorsing the kind of
preemptive war that characterized the Nazis. I don't
want a Cowboy-in-Chief roaming the world in search of
convenient villains on which to impose gunslinger
justice. There's a place for that in an episode of
"Gunsmoke," but in today's world we have the United
Nations to resolve international disputes. It took
World War II and the deaths of 53 million people to
create that institution; it seems a waste to disregard
that so you can play Judge Roy Bean.

Your West of the Pecos diplomacy has created a
trickle-down paranoia that is ruining the
neighborhood. We are becoming a dog-eat-dog,
everyman-for-himself nation of fair-weather friends.
That's what happens when the PATRIOT Act makes enemies
of librarians and when the Pentagon begins probing our
emails. There are other ways to track Al Qaeda without
having to know everything about me going back to those
X-ray specs I ordered from the back of Boys' Life.

I know we don't agree. After all, I am a liberal — by
your definition, a godless feminist heathen running an
abortion clinic in my kitchen and a gay wedding chapel
in my garage. Hey, in today's economy, a guy's gotta
make a buck. But rest assured that I am no atheist. I
know there must be a God. With you in the White House,
if there wasn't, we'd surely be dead by now.

So, on behalf of liberals everywhere, and with all the
Viagra of progressive thought I can muster, I extend
this salute. I offer it with my best wishes and the
sincere hope that all who made your victory possible
will someday share your deep convictions, both federal
and state.