Last night in America: Millions of heads, unsleeping, staring at night-darkened ceilings, feeling their souls take on the color of the night that surrounds them... First: "Impeachment is off the table"... Next: Giving Bush his war-funding bill, gutted of all timelines... Now: This, this FISA monstrosity that grants legitimacy and legal cover to the impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors of a power-drunk administration...
Inside those heads, names.... Webb... McCaskill...occasionally burst, illuminating the internal darkness with the hot, searing flames of a collective trust set afire by an incendiary betrayal... Casey...Klobuchar... why?... Why?... WHY???
Names: Newly elected names, swept into office by the winds of change; newly-mortared bricks in the firewall that was to protect us from creeping fascism... creeping no longer as the cadence of marching bootsteps sounds grows louder now... closer in the mind’s ear, heard through the gaping holes in the firewall where our freshly placed bricks have already crumbled to dust...
Questions swirl: Who will now fill those holes?... Were these not the kind of candidates that the kos community – your community – my community - has precisely dedicated itself to?... "This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory"... We helped Webb, McCaskill, Casey, Klobuchar achieve that victory... and to what end?
Those are not stupid people... they are certainly more than capable of understanding just what their vote has wrought... nor could they have been hoodwinked by an administration that long ago abandoned any reliance on legislative subterfuge... and as for the notion that they are simply gutless, simpering invertebrates... Jim Webb? A coward??... another, even more horrible, answer begins to insinuate itself... no, it can’t be... it’s just too unthinkable... yet it persists... and grows until it fills the cavernous internal darkness...
Maybe they actually wanted this.
Yes, maybe they believe that it’s not a bad idea... nay, a GOOD idea... to keep a closer watch on the citizenry... (murmurs of cognitive dissonance, now)... not for the purposes of neutralizing a terrorist threat that they realize is largely a convenient fiction... (dissonance grows louder, more Schönbergian)... could it be... could it be that our 16 Democratic FISA bill enablers feel that the real threat to be neutralized lies within an American body politic that finds itself increasingly disenfranchised economically, socially, spiritually...
Seeking some, any connection to resolve the cog-dissonance that now blares Ornette-like within, the mind casts itself back to earlier that same evening... "Bill Moyers’ Journal" on TV... Barbara Ehrenreich is the guest, speaking about the growing income gap in America... "We are the most, class-divided of the industrialized countries, the most polarized," says she... she goes on to remark that it’s not sustainable, that eventually a breaking point will be reached... and then what?... she did not elaborate but the mind races to fill in the blanks... could this in fact be what our Senators dread?.... A Class War that pits the dwindling population of Elites (among whom our Senators themselves are comfortably entrenched) against the vast, roiling anger of the working poor... and with so many new organizing tools available today in this electronic day and age... perhaps, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to keep tabs on things, nip things in the bud before they move too far along...
Eventually, anger quells... smothered beneath a crushing sense of helplessness... a realization that we – almost every last one of us – is interwoven into the tapestry of illusion that 21st Century American is now become... we all have our roles and we play them well... even those of us who do not feel aligned with the criminal, autocratic regime... or the opposition party collaborationists... we are nonetheless complicit... we zap our electron anger back and forth at each other... we pound the pavement, knock on doors, give money to elect the next Webb, the next McCaskill, the next Klobuchar... however, all this activity - our activity - ultimately helps to sustain an illusion: a chimera of freedom... a chimera that will be used by our leaders to justify their next round of atrocities...
Sleep is coming. At long last. Tomorrow will be another day. I will wake up... sit down at my keyboard... there I will dutifully digitize these thoughts... register my own electronic disquiet and send it along for all and sundry to view.
And then: I will go out to breakfast and do some shopping.