Oh, Joy! Oh, Fuck!

This Wednesday after the election we hover in anticlimax, meandering here and there in a bout of confusion. Oh, yay, the House has been reclaimed by putative conservatives.  Oh fuck, Republicans are shut out in our backyard county council elections, again.  Oh joy, Mr. Crisp White Shirt and Red Tie is now the Governor of Ohio, a state your host has successfully avoided for 45 years, so doesn't really care.  Oh, crap, certified statist nutjobs will still run California.  Oh, creaminmypants, cast your eyes upon the Sunshine State and be blinded by the Republican solar prominance led by the son of Cuban exiles.  We're going to DisneyWorld one more time to celebrate!  Oh, bug up my ass, can it be true that Barney Frank has not been foreclosed on?  Oh, Allah the Merciful Slayer of Unbelievers, Peace be Upon Him and All Those Who Kill in His Name, a Republican has taken the Register of Wills slot in Backasswards County. 

So new names here and there to build an illusion of hope, but old names to continue the torment and stale brown tongued rhetoric, too.

We will not be predicting the future here, only condemning it as it reveals itself on a daily basis.   Nevertheless, a few basics are expected.  Whether Democrat or Republican, Statist or Conservative, we stand prepared to be betrayed, to see our principles trashed and corrupted in vain spasms of compromise, mendacious bipartisanship, and human weakness.  The other side will be to blame.  Everyone will overreach and the mainstream media and the blogosphere will deliver salvo after salvo on how their favored side has savaged justice and fair sport.  We each will find some kind of encouraging result on the margins indicating our trend is here to stay and their alloted grains of sand continue to drop without mercy through the glory hole.  We'll blame the government for all of this, either too much of it or too little.

My side, though, we grind our teeth at the gobsmacking losses (Boxer?  Again?  Really?), but we take our wins gladly today and want them to mean something significant.  And they do mean something significant - they mean blockade and barricade and obstruction.  We won't say hopeful because the other rat bastards have ruined the meaning of that word.  There's a world of division approaching our land.  The Republic remains in jeopardy.  But we can't say Americans are disinterested or detached.  They have chosen their army.  Here's some hope:  let's hope our sappers are better than theirs.

One last thing: the simple fact that so much attention and hullabaloo has been devoted to this election, declaring it the lodestone for determining the direction this country will take for rest of the century - and that is true - is proof enough that the government and its presence in our lives is nearly beyond control.  We should be arguing about government on the margins of our lives, not our lives on the margin of government.

The Elections

Jabberwocky

by Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought --

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

"And, hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'

He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.