Ben Tripp Can't Get No Satisfaction:
We all know George W. Bush is a prick, and we know his people are the biggest bunch of peckerwoods since Nixon assembled his cabinet. We know furthermore that this cabal of venomous schweens have wrought more havoc in the world, and done more damage at home in America, than any single American administration since the South decided to secede. Even the commercial media is beginning to take note of these undisputable facts. Pundits are lining up to get on the earliest possible train out of Bushville, but that train left before the World Trade Center fell. Anybody with access to good information knew these people were planning to screw the world, long before they got out the brace & bit. Apparently the media didn't have that access to good information.
Or maybe the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe-- and you know this is a rhetorical device, you know 'maybe' doesn't enter into the thing-- just maybe the media didn't give a rat's rip about good information. Maybe they're in the bullshit business, same as most politicians. Back to my original point, because there's some convergence that needs to happen. We all know George W. Bush is a prick, and everyone around him are not only pricks, they're smarter pricks than he is, so they have no excuse. And we know the largely conservative, reactionary, sensationalist mainstream media has been lapping their ample bags for the last five years-- and throughout most of the Clinton years, as well. Why then, with the big rotten media finally starting to admit Bush is a Bad Thing For America And The World, am I not happier? It's because millions and millions of Americans don't give a rat's rip about good information, either.
See, it takes two to get fooled. You need a fooler, and you need a goddamn fool. There were enough fools in 200 and enough fools in 2004 to put this turdmincer in office and keep him there. Granted, not a sufficient number of fools so he could win an election square and fair, but plenty sufficient so it was close enough to steal, both times. I still see bumper stickers supporting the bastard, supporting the war on Iraq. Far fewer than I saw two years ago, but you have to ask yourself, what kind of human beings are these that can't accept the evidence all around them? If there were 2600 dead Americans on my lawn, people would ask questions. Anybody would. So why aren't a third of Americans asking these questions of the Bush administration?
So that's the first thing that robs me of satisfaction as I watch Bush and his minions lose their tiny minds in a morass of bad poll numbers and the impending bum-battering this election year promises to bring (the terror-alert card didn't work this time-- it's been pulled from the deck so many times it's gotten grubby, and even an idiot can spot it amongst the cards these days). America is rife with assholes, to put it bluntly. I used to merely dislike Right-Wingers for being flinthearted, war-loving sons of bitches. I forgave the ones I knew personally, assuming them to be essentially good people that didn't get enough love when they were children. Or something.
Now I hate them, and I fear them, and I don't want to live in the same country they do, even though it is patently obvious I'm the one that's going to have to shine up my passport and fuck off out of it. They're not going anywhere. America won't be reunited in my lifetime, any more than it was reunited in the hundred years following the Civil War. I'm never going to forget what these ignorant, soulless fundamentalist woman-hating troglodytes did to my country, and several other countries, and the world at large. I'm not going to forgive, either. Half of Americans should put their beloved guns to their sanctimonious heads and blow their meager brains out for supporting war and death and destruction because they couldn't be bothered to seek out the facts beyond the cable news headlines, because they just like to kill dune coons, because they are mindless, superstitious, cowardly zombies sucking at the fartpipe of an authoritarian God that's the only sonofabitch meaner than this shitstain of a president. That's just the first thing that took all the fun out of watching the neoconservatives go down in flames.
The second thing is worse. Real people died because the government couldn't be bothered to follow up on an obvious plot to attack our country, on account of it was the president's vacation time again. Or, as so many now believe, because the government let it happen on purpose, or had a hand in it. And real people died again as we defeated an entire nation in pursuit of a single man. A man we then allowed to escape. A man we have since stopped looking for. Instead, real people died in Iraq-- and continue to die in numbers that the Black lague would envy-- to distract us from the abject failure of the hunt for Osama. And because what the hell, Iraq needed to die. It was in the playbook. Real people died in New Orleans, too, in an inexcusable act of willful negligence, as opposed to direct, bloody belligerence. They died just the same. I'll never forget that. How many died? Damn near as many as died on 9/11/01 in Manhattan. What have we done about it? The same thing we've done about the terrorists. Just about nothing.
The deaths of all these real human beings, that were born into the world, that suckled at their momma's titties, that learned how to talk one language or another, and found a god that suited them, or didn't, all these people that liked soccer or lamb chops or kissing or TV shows with David Hasselhoff, and a hundred thousand more that were too young to have learned anything much, but every single one of whom was born into this world just the same as George W. Bush, every cracker in Texas, Me, and Jesus Christ (in no particular order), all these deaths make it a sinful thing to even imagine taking satisfaction in the ruination of the Fourth Reich the neocons were attempting to erect.
I once thought I'd enjoy watching them go down. But it's no fun. We've lost the souls of half of our fellow Americans. They've become Nazis, monsters, Death-Eaters. We've lost countless civilians in distant lands, and miscounted tens of thousands of our own sons and daughters in the war. And we've lost too many freedoms. It is not too much to say that I have lost my country, and there are millions more that feel as I do.
Somewhere in a government-sponsored enemy-archive there is, I am told, a fat file stuffed with my writings, and probably the texts of my phone calls, and records of my financial transactions, too. They may also have all the documents pertaining to my divorce, and my kid's school report cards, and only the devil knows what else. I hope they will add this humble blog posting to that file, and I hope they will recognize that unlike them, I don't gloat over the destruction of my enemies. There's no satisfaction in it. The America I've lost is the same America they have lost, the only difference between me and the FBI agent in charge of filing my bumf being that I was kicking and screaming and he was collecting a paycheck.
So there's no satisfaction in watching the Right Wing implode. None at all. The price of admission was far too high. It is a bleak thing to admit, but if there is any satisfaction to be had, it is in knowing that the neocons --and the rotten-gutted millions that aided and abetted them-- must all live in the same world as the rest of us, forever washing their hands of blood that will not rinse away. And forever hosing off their patios, too, because when I figure out where they live, I intend to personally shit on their doorsteps if it takes me a thousand years. There may be some satisfaction in that.
