i’ve been musing on many thoughts tonight, as is my wont when i am drinking.
one was a mental livejournal post about how my friend Lisa and i are always coming to the same conclusions at the same time. that post may come later. needless to say, we are always on the same wavelength, to the extent that even when we disagree, we always have similar thoughts in mind. blah, blah, blah.
and somehow that morphed into (probably via my thoughts on Ralph Nader and the Election of the year 2000 C.E. of our lord Buddha (which is exactly how we met, as i was trolling – in the fishing sense – for Nader Raiders on the eve of the elections, having lost my vote by moving to Ohio from Florida with the exact wrong timing)) a train on the American Dichotomy. listen:
we are Americans. we are THE world’s underdogs who won.
not to be confused with THE world’s Underdogs (of which there are many), or with THE world’s Winners (England, or the Roman Empire). we are THE world’s Underdog Winners.
we fought back at our oppressors, and we won. we won. as underdogs, we won. and when nations sought to take from us that which we called Freedom, we won again. and when we ourselves have found ourselves embroiled in heated battle with other Americans over the issues of our day… whatever was Truly American won out, in the end. Slavery? not American. move aside. you have lost, we have won. Senator McCarthy? traitor. step down, please. you have lost, we have on. Jim Crow? please. this is America. we have IDEALS here, for fuck’s sake.
the point being, the American inherently loves an underdog who is a winner. it is as much a part of our National Character as it is in our Blood. and how rare it is that the two happen to be one and the same!
so what do we have now? we have Underdogs – the Democrats, and other Liberals, Leftists, and so forth… and we have Winners – the Grand Ole Party, Republicans, and those like-minded traitors who seek to subvert our glorious and humane system for their own gory profits.
right now, we have no underdog winners. we have Howard Dean, but he has not won enough. and we have George Bush, a man who has seen defeat at his own barely-opposable-thumbed hands (think minor-league baseball, oil, military service, and a general lack of understanding of basic principles of thought) and somehow managed to come out as the governor of the most massive state in the Union, and somehow (and rather inexplicably, save for the grace of his brother Jeb, who just happened to be governor of the biggest electorally-contested state) from there to the Presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth. and because he may soon drive that nation straight into the dirt, he may even be an underdog for the umpteenth time.
“how the world dearly loves a cage”
-Maude (Ruth Gordon), Harold & Maude, 1971 (written by Colin Higgins) (the year i was fucked into existence)
we Americans love only one thing more than we love an underdog-winner: we love to cage and be caged. we are self-flagellists. we are not only the President of Hairshirt Club, but also a member. if there’s one thing we understand, it’s how to put ourselves into a position of indetermination. we love to be in a corner! because we love to fight. no wonder one of the very few forms of expression we’ve cultivated to be able to fully support many different enterprises has been WRESTLING leagues! we love to fight! we want nothing more than to put ourselves at the bottom and fight our way back up!
we have Winners, and we have Losers. but we don’t have a proper LoserWinner just yet. so what’s going to happen next? how can we possibly make up our minds about who we’ll choose to lead us into the next great phase of the 21st Century Dawn?
the Good money (of which there is generally little) is on the Smart contenders. but the Smart money is on the Dumb ones.
