September Blues

For anyone naïve enough to believe it can’t get any worse in the United States than it already has over the past four years, please come to my apartment and allow me to box your ears. How…HOW can an incompetent, smirking, prevaricating, dumb-ass like George Bush be running even in the polls with John Kerry in the final two months of this campaign? How is it possible that someone ill-prepared to be Mayor of Crawford, Texas, let alone President of the United States, may actually get a second term to drawl and swagger through the same hallways, meeting rooms and bedrooms as Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy? How is it possible in a land where information is available at one’s fingertips and in virtually endless supplies can an electorate be so ignorant as to willingly vote for an incoherent, coward like Bush?

We are being swept through history faster than we can think about the journey. Like Dorothy and Toto, tornado-force winds are madly twirling us toward some realization that only horrendous pain and loss can ultimately reveal. It won’t be the biblical apocalypse, but it will be an American apocalypse, and our ancestors, from whatever celestial perch they may be watching, will not recognize the barren, scorched land they once helped nurture to greatness.

Like Ronald Reagan’s sanctimonious tree-mugger James Watt, Bush isn’t much concerned about the future of planet Earth. The end days are just a few mangled speeches away, then it will all be history. Smooth sailing. It is typical of Bush the coward to believe such a fantasy. He is probably already negotiating in his prayers for a preferred place in line into the Eternal Kingdom. “God, you do know who my Daddy is…. Need I say more?” Yes, someone, God in this case, will clean up George’s mess for the umpteenth time and he’ll evade responsibility for his actions because…well, because he has so darn much money.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll work. Much has already come to pass that I never would have dreamed could happen. If, in the end, it is Bush’s version of heaven, he’ll get all the deferments he needs for a plush cloud in a tony neighborhood of Paradise. But if it’s not….