Less Nit, More Grit

Every time I think we have sixteen MORE weeks of hair-pulling masquerading as a campaign for the office of the most powerful person in the world, the President of the United States of America, I throw up just a  tiny little bit (more) in my own mouth. Remember that 'I know you are but what am I?' taunt from the third grade schoolyard at recess? 

Here's its 2012 variation, guten appetit. In addition to the Oval Office contestants' hissy-fitting, pussy-footing, and poo-flinging we have yet to endure (there's talk of six billion dollars being raised and spent to elect the next President. Six billion bucks. You can have a war in Afghanistan for 82 minutes for that money!), there's 435 races for the House of Representatives, thirty-three Senate campaigns, probably close to three dozen gubernatorial elections and who knows how many state legislature and municipal body elections.

And in terms of the Big O and the Mit-Wit, it's not like we don't have real issues in search of real answers-be it foreign policy, fiscal controls, environmental and civil rights matters-we are a pretty big ball of fire right now and these guys are having at it with seltzer bottles. The house is rocking with domestic problems and these two and their shills and surrogates (did you catch that caption under the picture of Sununu in the upper left hand corner back at the link? Talk about putting the coarse back in our civil discourse) think they can win an election on whether or not Mrs Pickle's tax claims are fair game?

We are better than this, are we not? We have sent hundreds of thousands of our very best trained and absolutely brightest, kindest and most amazing young people to the farthest corners of this globe where they have been killed by the thousands and maimed and marred by the tens and hundreds of thousands to defend a democracy and a way of life whose values and beliefs we casually and contemptuously use to wipe our own butts with on a daily basis on the front page of every newspaper and as the lead story on every TV newscast here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

How dare those who claim to wish to represent us behave like the petulant, ignorant and arrogant asshats that they are. They cannot possibly be the best we can do because if they are, we are lost-actually we are beyond lost, we are swallowed up and forgotten. A people and a place that proved to be more aberration than inspiration. A once grand notion of a proud nation that drowned in its own dreck and dregs and became a cautionary tale for the rest of the world just as the rest of that world needed us the most.

Turner's Manifest Destiny seems to be out of time, space and luck. We refuse to lower our voices so we'll be forced to lower our expectations and eliminate optimism and hopefulness not only from our vocabulary but from our horizon of expectations and that of our children and theirs. The fairy tale finally ends with the Walrus and the Carpenter. Wow. Mission accomplished: We can't make it here anymore.
-bill kenny