I gotta keep movin
I gotta keep movin
Blues fallin down like hail
And the days keeps on worryin me
There's a hellhound on my trail
Although the shouting continues, the election is most definitely over. A clear majority of American voters chose to stay the course of the reality-TV approach to politics and government. Apparently, you can fool most of the people most of the time. And for this administration, that's good enough.
So be it. It's probably not the end of the world. And even if it is, there's not much we can do about it now.
In my more fatalistic moments, I sometimes speculate that Dubya is the Antichrist. Most of the time, though, I put him and the Cheney-Rove-Energy Mafia-Radical Fundamentalist coalition that pulls his strings in the ever-growing category of evildoers who do not hate freedom as much as they believe that it only applies to certain chosen people in certain situations.
Like everyone else, I voted on the basis of moral values. As a patriot, I consider leading the country into war under false pretenses an act of treason and voted accordingly. Although it seems to have caught the pollsters and pundits by surprise, voting is always about moral values. Once you enter that booth and the curtain closes behind you and you find yourself face-to-face with that cold, gray, metal wall of levers and possibilities, all the noise of the campaign stops and the choices you make are between you and your conscience. I have no legitimate gripe against anyone who voted for what he believes to be right, no matter how passionately I may disagree. That's the way democracy works. And probably it is our core beliefs and values, and they way we interpret them, that sway us more than all the arguments, accusations and advertising. That is as it should be.
On the other hand, moral values can be dangerous. The towers of the World Trade Center were flattened in the name of moral values. Morality is the last refuge of the desperate.
But enough about the election, already. We are done licking our wounds. It's time to move on.
Times like these always send me running back to the blues (walking is most too slow). The blues was born in a previous incarnation of a culture that values freedom but has managed to find some mighty peculiar ways of defining it. It sprung up as the natural and honest expression of African-Americans who arose from slavery only to enter a world of Jim Crow, labor camps, and lynchings. The monkey junk of the blues is that it embodies all the contradictions -- hope and despair, fear and desire, God and the devil, love and violence, the individual and society, chaos and harmony, etc. -- that make us the well-intentioned but basically fucked-up species we are.
A soundtrack for the apocalypse.
