CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

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"What More Can I Say? Democracy Doesn't work." Part 1: The Paranoia

Saturday, November 06, 2004

this entry brought to you by audioslave, "cochise"


i have a lot to say. this is going to be very long and very wordy, so for the sake of those of you who read this at work, i'm going to split it into two entries: saturday and sunday, and i'll have a late polarity on monday. i'm sorry i couldn't keep this weeks entries daily, but i'm sure you can see why i waited for my thoughts to collect before i attempted to tackle this topic.


It has been four days since the election. My body is tired and weak, perhaps a bit jittery. I've had a few good nights' sleep over the past two weeks but they have been catch-ups that leave me still tired by the next midday. I wouldn't call the insomnia that I suffer from chronic. Most nights I put in my earplugs and take my sleeping pills and sleep the whole night sound. But sometimes even the help I get from drugs and plugs doesn't help-- some nights I just don't manage to sleep. It happens two or three times a year, periods of insomnia. I'm lucky if they last just a week; sometimes they can last a few months. Sometimes they're triggered by something stressful in my life, other times they are unexplainable. In all honesty, other than an unfortunate break up with my then-girlfriend, I don't think I've had a better reason for losing sleep in my entire lifetime, unless I count times where I've gone to sleep knowing someone's life was in danger, and I'm not even sure has ever happened.

I tongue the sore in my mouth, knowing it'll never heal if I don't stop, but I can't, and moreover, I won't. It's a dull, irritating pain that I feel. Constantly there, sometimes ignorable, sometimes just sort of there. But ignoring it is just too much trouble.

As a writer you're taught that you should use analogies from your actual life, things that you think people can actually feel when you describe it to them. The dull, irritating pain of the sore of my mouth would make a rotten analogy here, though. What I feel isn't dull and irritating, it is overwhelming, it is encompassing. It's a constant roar in my head, a war, in fact, a war of terrible ideas and thoughts in which everyone is on the same side.

A few times at work since Thursday-- I couldn't find the energy nor the desire to go to work on Wednesday the 3rd-- coworkers, knowing full well my stance on politics, have asked me why I look so down. I tell them that they know full well why I am down. And they ask me if I'm disappointed, if I'm mad that Kerry lost. Disappointed isn't the right word. Disenfranchised. Livid. Horrified.

I'm sitting here searching for words, not because I don't know what to say, but not sure the tone I should pick to say it. I feel like letting all the anger, rageful words out of my head, rare and raw. This is my blog and I'll do what I wanna. But then, I want to take a more calculated, level approach. The worst thing I could do is let my enemies (read: half of America) see me as a radical liberal, a crazy kid who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, a conspiracy-theory toting, logic-thrashing moron, easily dismissed. Then I think that no matter how I handle my words the gloating masses will dismiss me anyway, and the people who read this (so precious few compared with this site's heyday) will nod, will understand, will agree, goddammit.

George Bush is stealing this election, I said to myself as I watched the map of the country light up blood red in Republican electoral votes. I knew he was going to try to do it. And I knew how he was going to try to do it. I'd been paranoid about electronic voting since the first days the goons of the Megalomaniac In Chief started talking about it. I'd mentioned it sparingly on my Polarities a few times (to avoid coming off too conspiracy minded) but cautioningly. I was going to make a link to a very concerning headline on Yahoo the other week with my Bushwhacker entry, but lo and behold, just one hour and twelve minutes after being made a headline, it completely disappeared from Yahoo, and I couldn't find it no matter how deeply I dug.

I knew he stole the election. I could smell it, I could see it unfolding with such predictability. Every person in the country that voted Democratic had a gut feeling it was happening, didn't they? Record numbers in the history of our nation showed up to vote... for the incumbent President? New voters typically vote for the new guy, and the statistics were there. Four out of five first-time voters voted for Kerry. These record numbers racking up, new voters are overwhelmingly voting Democratic, yet state after state turned red.

But despite this gut feeling that I know half of the fucking country felt, what could we do? Such a huge percentage of us didn't even know about the evils of electronic voting, and those that did only had a hunch that something was funny. To those of us who didn't know for sure what was going on, it was unfolding so naturally. State after state fell Republican. The numbers were all there. 55% Bush here, 48% Kerry there... Sure, the exit polls showed Kerry in the lead in almost every single state, and the drastic flip-flop in Bush's favor every single time was odd, but what was there to do but sigh in despair?

And maybe Bush won fair and square, but how are we possibly voting more Republicans into the House, into Senate? How is it possible that an already Republican-majority Capital could somehow become even more Republican-majority? A system of checks and balances just doesn't work when everyone thinks the same selfish things, breeds the same horrible lies, answers to the same dictator. This isn't a Republic anymore, is it? This is fascism, isn't it? It just didn't make any fucking sense, but what was there to do? The numbers were all there.

George Bush and his regime stole the election. And there's no paper trail to prove it. They are committers of fraud, and just like the best criminals, they are in the political equivalent of the Virgin Islands living it up as much as grossly and smugly as they want.

I am horrified, and I am truly and utterly afraid. But what fills me with rage isn't so much what Bush did to this election. I honestly and truly felt like Kerry was going to win. In my heart of hearts I knew that Kerry would win. And I knew he would win by such a large margin that Republican trickery wouldn't have mattered. They could pad the numbers in their favor all they wanted, it wasn't going to stop the American voice. The people would be heard. We would stand supreme.

Except that the people did show up by the metric ton to vote for Bush. The election wasn't his, but what bothers me the most, what fills me with rage and disgust to my core isn't that Bush stole the election, but that enough people-- half the fucking country-- legitimately did vote Bush, and the padding was just enough to push him over the fucking predictable edge.

And right now, I couldn't possibly have any less faith in this country. I don't mean I have no faith in the country's history, not in the founding fathers, in the meaning of the country, but the millions upon millions of idiot, disgusting, horrible people that occupy it. It's not the ideas of the country that offend me, it's my countrymen that fill me with rage.

We're not just talking about my being a sore loser here, or Democrats being sore losers. This wasn't a competition, it wasn't a game. To me, this was about Good and Evil. And Good lost. Obviously the opposition can claim the same thing, but only one candidate has 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths under his belt. Only one candidate can claim to have committed the equivalent of thirty 9/11s, just to prove the Saddam Hussein wasn't, you know, kidding. The opposition can claim that their candidate was the one representing "Good", but, well, they'd be wrong. Unequivocably.

If I were being a "sore loser" I wouldn't vote ever again. That's being a "whiney liberal". But when you feel like you just witnessed good battle evil and lose, it doesn't make one want to not vote again. It makes one want to move to Canada. I have talked to several Democrats who feel the same way. There's a rumbling under our grounds. And we have got to jump ship before the hull bursts and drowns our children.
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 (cont'd tomorrow...)

with love from CRS @ 6:11 PM 

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