Sodomy and gratitude
Nine perfect ways to prepare for the End of Bush. Can you believe it?
Friday, October 17, 2008
No one can really quite believe it.
It is the thing That Can Barely Be Named, the Great Unspoken, the impossible truth that feels too good to be true and hence few dare actually mention it aloud lest it somehow vanish and
time reverses itself and the devil snorts and chuckles and reveals his grand, horrible joke, and suddenly it's 2001 all over again. Please, no screaming.
Can you sense it? Do you feel the deep tingle? Because amid the fiscal meltdown and Obama's stunning poll numbers and the stress of the election, this staggering fact: George W. Bush is nearly done. He will soon be gone forever, America's most spectacularly incompetent footnote, the oily residue left on the pavement after his administration's giant Hummer of ineptitude is finally hauled to the crusher.
It is, to put it mildly, a bizarre feeling. Surreal. Disorienting. After all, the nightmare has lasted so long. This wound has been raw and open for years.
No matter. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. It is easy to overlook the grand prize, the greatest gift this decade has yet to offer. Yes, it's Obama, but also the flipside: an America without Bush anywhere near the steering wheel. Hallelujah indeed.
So then, I have made a quick inventory, a short preparatory checklist of things you can do, right now, to get ready for the magnificent shift, the massive exhale of thanksitude. Because no matter how bleak and tense it all seems right now, just remember: He can never be president again. God, my fingertips quiver just writing that.
1) Make new travel plans. Yes, the dollar has been gutted. Yes, a small espresso and a day-old sourdough baguette on the rue du Cherche-Midi will cost you 97 dollars. But if you can afford it, now is the time to plan a new European jaunt.
Why? Easy: No more foreigners scowling at you. No more shameful hiding of your nationality. No more telling that hot barista you're from Canada and instead confessing, with even a tiny hint of Obama-infused national pride, "I'm American," and then not apologizing and feeling that sickly sense of mortification. Incredible.
2) Whip out your 2009 Precious Moments wall calendar, start blocking out weekends for all the spring weddings now being planned by your most lovestruck gay friends. Pitiable evangelical panic aside, Proposition 8 shows hopeful signs of being slammed to the ground like the hateful piece of homophobic intolerance it so very much is (then again, as of this writing, this one's still too close to call). At least Connecticut just joined the gay marriage party. What will you wear? Who tosses the bouquet?
3) Remember books? Actual literature? Stock up. Read more 3 Quarks Daily and N+1 and Arts & Letters Daily, subscribe to the New York Review of Books, TLS, The Atlantic, The Sun. Prepare, in other words, for a new climate of intellectual stimulation and curiosity. Prime your mind. It's been a while since someone in the White House had an IQ higher than a pickup's tailpipe. The quality of the national dialogue is about to improve tremendously.
4) Remember Lawrence v. Texas? The landmark 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned the Lone Star State's hateful little law that made consensual sodomy a criminal offense? That single decision has proved to be quietly revolutionary, knocking down similar insidious laws across the nation and transforming the government's role in legislating sexual morality in your own bedroom. You want to celebrate Bush's permanent retirement to Crawford? Enjoy the perfect send-off with a well-lubricated loved one? You know what to do.
5) Get ready to pray. To Shiva, to Shakti, to Astarte and Allah and Buddha and Jesus and the Great Mother and whatever divine energy you like that the Dems don't completely botch it, get just as power-drunk and monomaniacal as their GOP counterparts, and squander what's shaping up to be an astonishing opportunity to reshape the American experiment.
Fact: the neocons and the evangelicals had a stranglehold on the U.S. government for six solid years, and they very nearly destroyed the country. The good news is, there is nowhere for the Dems to go but up. They can't possibly do worse. The bad news is, even with a brilliant, steady, unflappable President Obama at the helm, they could sure as hell try.
6) God is dead. Or rather, the Repub's particularly cruel version, a gloomy, tyrannical, guilt-slingin' God from Colorado Springs who loved war and smacked up women's rights and pretended to tolerate gay people even while hating "what they do," a God who snorted the Republican agenda like it was cheap meth in a Denver motel room, has proven to be a complete failure, an abomination of divine connection. Translation: God is not what they say, and She never was.
I have no suggestion here. Please feel free to invent your own.
7) Plant a garden. Sow a seed. Map out a plan. Prepare a new project, business, yoga practice, love interest, a great thwopping orgasm of why-the-hell-not. See, the energy is changing. The sorcerer's curse is lifting, the wicked witch is dead, the land is barren no more. Anything that needs to grow can now begin to flourish. Anything positive and conscious that gets planted now stands a far better chance of prospering. It's simple cosmic physics.
What, don't believe in that like-attracts-like, up-your-vibration, collective-consciousness hippie crap? How sad for you. And your fellow Republicans.
8) Gratitude. Cultivate it. Celebrate it. You survived. Check that: You survived, barely. To be sure, the accident was awful. The crash was bloody and hellish, far worse than anyone expected. Tens of thousands dead. Hotbeds of terrorism now even hotter. Fewer jobs, more homelessness, more fear, prisons overflowing, banks failing.
So then. Is it not time to feel thankful? That you're still here? That we made it all the way to rock bottom, and we're still breathing? How about that you're still reading these words, right now, and I'm still here to write them, and we still have this connection, this tenuous lifeline of thought and discourse and humor, even as the imps of dread and conservative numbness tried for years to block it, derail it, shut it all down?
9) See them there, receding, sliding back into the Void with a wail and a whimper. Prepare, at long last, to wave goodbye.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/10/17/notes101708.DTL
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