It has only been a week and I’m already getting sick of the platitudes. Yes, this election was an absolute travesty for liberals across America. Yes, the future looks a bit grim. And yes, planning to make an impossibly ambiguous political statement by impaling a large dead deer on the fence in front of the White House is an attractive alternative to quietly allowing the violation of certain American freedoms. But none of this is going to change the results of the election. Though it does feel awfully good to think about the look on the Secret Service agent’s face when he carries you away kicking and screaming from the White House while you’re covered in animal blood. If you’re into that sort of thing.
A lot of people have been saying lately that “four years isn’t that long a time”. I’m not sure if I agree with it. Four years is one-fifth of my entire life thus far. To put it into perspective, try to remember what you were like four years ago. Four years ago when your braces would get caught on your sweater and you would end up with a hole in your shirt and blue fuzz hanging from your front tooth. Or when you first got your driver’s license and tried to pick up girls driving your mother’s white mini-van and accidentally drove the car into the side of the Dairy Queen. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a long time ago to me.
On a related note, although the idea of four more years of Republican leadership is a bit troubling, every cloud isn’t without its silver lining. Through careful research I have discovered that throughout my life, whenever there was a Republican President, I have become inexplicably cooler. Seriously. From birth to age nine I got cooler all the time. From a lame fetus I became a walking, talking, tricycle riding, cute kid who spoke poorly worded English with a slight lisp. It’s the only kind of cool you can be when you’re that young, but it’s still in a sense “cool”. Then in 1992, Clinton takes power, I enter my “sweatpants phase” and everything goes downhill. Glasses, bad haircuts, the early stages of puberty, dodge ball day in gym class, marching band, the math team. It was all bad news. But strangely enough, when Bush comes into power I start making a slow, but definite comeback. Slight mishaps involving braces and mini-vans aside, I make leaps and bounds in the crucial “not-being-totally-lame” aspect of life during the Bush presidency. I don’t think I’m alone here. In fact, I’ve long believed that Wesleyan is made of kids who were chosen last for kickball and befriended the kid who had one leg shorter than the other and the other kid from a foreign country that no one could find on the map in the fourth grade classroom.
Now granted, I still have a long way to go, which is why I’m thinking that a second Bush term can’t be all bad. In four very long years I can make some definite progress so that if I’m going to lose all of my rights and watch America go to hell in a hand basket, I can at least take some solace in the fact that in some way I’m a less pathetic human being than I was before. Now that I think about it, it’s really not that much solace at all, but I’m trying to be positive here and stop feeling the need to cry in my bathtub for hours.
Of course I need to do something in these next four years besides becoming obnoxiously cooler. So here’s the way I look at it: four years is also a long time where everyone can blame all of our problems on George W. Bush. Because if we can’t get him out of office, we might as well take advantage of it. And I’m not just talking about blaming Bush for the big things like being unemployed, getting rejected from grad school, having expensive medical problems or having your Humvee ambushed by armed Iraqi teenagers. I’m talking about stuff like stubbing your toe, your milk going bad, and someone else dressing up as the same Belgian Dadaist painting as you for Halloween. Because who knows how far the influence of Bush and the vast right-wing conspiracy extends? If anyone asks, it was the shadow government. Or failing that, Halliburton.
So I guess what I’m saying is this. Do something. Anything. And if something goes wrong, blame Bush and move on. Because we’ve all been seeing conspiracies against Kerry for months. Its time we use our extensive liberal paranoia for something more important to our daily lives, like explaining how I accidentally slept with one of my girlfriend’s roommates.
Sorry.
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