Get Over It?

Apparently conservatives are now so anxious about the growing backlash against the Moron Puppet of Evil that they are trying to spin liberal hatred of Bush as “unnatural.” They are once again dragging out the tired accusation that the left “never got over the 2000 presidential election.” Like that’s a bad thing.

Let me be the first (or the billionth) to admit that I do in fact harbor what I believe to be a quite natural hatred of the Moron Puppet of Evil. I hate him, yes, just because he is a rich, white, illiterate fratboy, because he was expensively educated and can’t even speak, because he is morally repugnant and claims to talk to God. Call me judgmental and narrow-minded--I am not open to the idea that illiterate morons can be president. Call me a sore loser—I am still indignant that this man masquerading as president is committing horrible crimes, and he was not even the one we elected to commit them. I am STILL NOT OVER the 2000 election. How embarrassing. How uncool. How lame, like not being “over” a relationship that ended, as did all semblance of American democracy, in December 2000, though like democracy, the relationship was dead long before that.

WRONG! It is not embarrassing “not to be over” the 2000 election. Here’s a novel idea: why doesn’t the mainstream left stop apologizing for everything the conservatives accuse them of and start embracing these things instead? Let’s be so NOT over the 2000 election that we undo it. Let’s make it the central issue of 2004. Revenge plays well in the movies, and we now know that the movies play well as politics in California, and California is the key to the presidency. “We’re not over it” would be a great slogan for the Democrats in 2004, considering their philosophy for the last three years has pretty much been “We’re out of it.”

I think “We’re not over it,” could really help us get one of those other rich white guys elected, you know, the better kind--the ones who will quietly bomb countries without demanding anything as vulgar as all-out war (like Clinton did in Sudan) and do benevolent things like let women in the Third World decide whether they want to have children or not and not pave the national parks and only uphold the patents on AIDS drugs so people in the Third World can’t get them when it’s like, really politically necessary for them to do that. You know, a Democrat.

Getting over it turned out to be pretty dangerous. The idea that we should be “over” the 2000 election has been used to encourage Americans to support a president who was not democratically elected. But when they want to, this administration also knows how to use “not getting over it” to its advantage. The idea that we should never get over September 11 has somehow morphed into blindly supporting wars with no justifiable cause and astronomical human and economic cost, perpetrated by that same unelected president.

So I’ll just keep my unnatural Bush hatred over here with my inconvenient residue from September 11--you know, that idea you get from watching your own city on fire that killing innocent civilians because you believe their government is a threat to you doesn’t solve anything.

One of the many truths I hold to be self-evident is that a vast majority of artists and freelancers (often one and the same) suffer from undiagnosed--and therefore self-medicated--ADD and OCD, as well as narcissism, megalomania coupled with wild insecurity and a tendancy towards mood swings. These people are either in their apartments for days at a time alternately freaking out and creating things or out in the world desperately seeking to cure their boredom with the only thing that really interests them: the creation of and participation in total chaos.

I am in one of those apartment-dwelling phases. Just me and the congealing risotto and the mounds and mounds of work I need to get done in order to continue eating the yuppie cheeses I so enjoy. This explains why today I have measured my apartment for new shelves, calculated the amount of speaker wire I will need to optimize my stereo setup, planned a week-long mid-October music marathon (spanning boy-punk, girl-punk, co-ed punk, guitar rock, folk/country and hip-hop) and harshly edited my closet of "sentimental pants," (pants that you only keep for sentimental reasons). In other words, I've done everything but what I should be doing, which is ghostwriting a political rant for a charming octogenarian leftist named Selma.

But this pathological procrastination has yielded one uniquely illuminating moment. Just when I finally commenced to actually do today's Selma allotment, I was suddenly struck with the idea that the picture that is sitting on my desk would look better on the windowsill by the bed. I jumped up and put the picture on the windowsill.

Back at the desk, I noticed that without the picture, which has a lot of trees, the vista was too black-and-white. I wanted the picture to go back where it was.

So I pressed Control+Z (a.k.a. the "Undo Last Action" hot key) on my computer keyboard.