Unnecessary Pipe Trench Excavation

Posts Tagged ‘election’

It’s the mother of all ambivalence.

On the one hand, I readily admit, it’s really cool that we elected someone who is not an old white guy, or even a young white guy, to be president. Not that I have an innate problem with white guys, being one myself. But given all the racism that still pervades my country today, both overt and otherwise, I never would have thought I’d live to see this day, and I’m proud of my country that it proved me wrong. Seriously, up until Tuesday night, I really didn’t think it was possible, and I really am happy that it happened in my lifetime.

I think Tom Toles, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, put it best, simply and eloquently:

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So, I hopped in the car to drive to the polling place — not that I think my vote really means anything, to be cynically honest, since I didn’t vote for either mainstream presidential candidate, but there were some local and state issues I felt I should vote on. Plus I didn’t want to give up my right to bitch for the next four years or until I establish permanent residence elsewhere (hopefully the latter will occur soonest).

So anyway, I get in the car, turn on the ignition, and what comes blaring out of the CD deck? The song Vision Thing, by Sisters of Mercy. A purely unintentional but nevertheless ironic coincidence. “Things are gonna change; I can feel it.”

And yes, for the record I voted my conscience, which is a shade of green this year. Yes, I voted Green. Run, Cynthia, run. Aside from everything else that is wrong with these two and this election, above all else I still can’t believe that whichever wins the presidency, America will have voted in a president that voted in the Senate to abridge our civil rights, putting their stamp of approval on a system of domestic spying with no checks or balances. And they both supported the bailout, too … damn, I’ll be glad when my people come back for me and take me back to my home planet.

Technorati Tags: vote, green, election

Ah, I’ve come circle; I’m no longer morose and melancholy over a) the election, b) the financial meltdown, and c) the government’s subsequent bailout. It’s gone beyond mystifying and transcended to the realm of the absurd … the insanely absurd. The Absurd with a capital A. I feel like my brain broke and that intead of witnessing and participating in reality, I’m in a French existential comedy – the world has transcended, or rather descended, into a work by Sartre or Camus. Maybe Beckett.

Dubya comes on the television and says in order to save the free market the government has to use taxpayer money to buy shares in private banks. So … we need socialism to preserve the free market? We have to partially nationalize private banks in order to save them? We had to burn down the village in order to save it?

We got into this mess by people living beyond their means, and people banking – literally – on the fact that people were doing this. So, we have to use taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street so banks will extend credit again – so the same people whose tax money is being used for the bail out can continue to live beyond their means, and investment bankers can continue to get rich off of them. And the best part of it is, the people in charge of implementing this bailout were, up until a few years ago, investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, making money hand over fist from sub-prime mortages – in other words, some of the same folk that got us into this mess have been tasked with getting us out of it.

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Technorati Tags: election, bailout, Absurd, Sartre, Camus, Beckett