Bizarro World on Five Dollars a Day

I listen to death metal and public radio.

I like big heavy history books and cheap paperback thrillers.

I play thirty-year-old video games and fret over my lawn.

I refuse to grow up, but my life is devoted to helping my two babies do just that.

None of this makes me special or noteworthy. It just makes me an American – what I thought was an American. I thought the whole point was that we couldn’t be condensed down into a Bud-Bowl-stupid A or B choice. We could be generous with social programs and still want dickheads who game the system or break the law to rot in a cell. We could support troops and question a war. We could love our families and respect our elders without turning our faith, or lack thereof, into a whose-dick-is-bigger church-envy contest.

So why is it that so many of my fellow countrymen seem so eager to stuff themselves into that little box? Individuality is what’s supposed to be our, you know, thing – our specialty. But when we’re faced with the choice of someone relatively nuanced – someone who at least tries to understand that nothing in the world is black and white – we take the pretend Maverick instead, the Applebee’s version of a rebel, someone who pushes all our John Wayne buttons and makes us feel like it’s Morning in America – the morning of January 1, 1954.

“The surge is working! You didn’t support the surge!” Is a little bit of nuance really that unpalatable to us? We have more, bigger and louder news outlets than at any point in our history – we can’t spend five minutes exploring this whole “surge?” How those vaunted “commanders on the ground” whose judgment Bush supposedly holds sacrosanct were replaced wholesale when they didn’t “support the surge!” How we’re only staving off civil war with Yankee greenbacks, paying former insurgents to be our friends, even as the ruling party is already beginning to disenfranchise them? No shit al-Maliki wants us to go home – he wants us to stop giving a headstart to his next headache.

But hey, “the surge is working!” And Obama doesn’t even dare say “yes, but…” or he’s some kind of pussy liberal candy-ass who doesn’t love America, and oh, by the way, where’s your flag pin, boy?

Russia and Georgia – there are no heroes there. Saakashvili is a dumb fuck in over his head, trying to keep pretending Abkhazia and South Ossetia were ever actually under his jurisdiction anywhere but on a map. Russia, of course, longs to return to the days when it could solve delicate diplomatic conundrums in its backyard with a thousand-megaton flyswatter. And what does it mean for John Wayne McCain?

It gives him a chance to rail about Russia, just like Grandpa Ronnie did. Don’t think that big room full of middle-aged white guys didn’t get boners at the mere echo of what for them was the glory days. “We are all Georgians,” but until we can find a way to conscript another hundred thousand young kids not already up to their asses in Iraq or going off the rails with PTSD, can you guys hold that thought, and, like, don’t let Putin cut off the pipeline? Thanks.

And his lack of understanding of the situation – his boiling down of a complex and frightening mess into us-and-them, with-us-or-agin-us rootin-tootin Yosemite Sam strut, makes him a bigger hero to these onionheads.

It’s shameful that we won’t make use of this ludicrous bounty of information and communication we have before us, to talk about things and make informed decisions. We line up at the trough for soundbytes and even when they’re patently false, we cling to them (bitterly?) because thinking about stuff is hard. “Russia bad!” “Drill baby drill!” “Obama’s a Muslim!” “Sarah said no thanks to the Bridge to Nowhere!”

Up against that kind of willful ignorance and hooting dumbassery, fuzzy words like “hope” and “change” sound positively exhilarating. They’re not a solution by themselves – no one said they were, except for some right-wing assholes who know better in their rotten hearts – but as bases to operate from, and guiding principles, could you ask for anything better?

“There’s not a day when I’m not proud of my country,” oozes Mitt Romney, a dig at Michelle Obama. Why is it not possible to love your country and agonize over its faults? Or, for that matter, to acknowledge they exist? To dwell on a history of injustice, or a war fought under false pretense, or an economy ruined by selfish and short-sighted assholes now mewling for the government teat like a Ninth Ward crack baby, is to hate America? How impaired can your thought process be, man?

I know the world needs another blog like McCain needs another misshapen jowl. But I’m tired of ranting to the car radio and Wolf Blitzer. I’m sick of feeling powerless against the forces of proud stupidity. I’m fed up with having to justify myself as a patriot to people who undermine everything that makes this country good, but do it in a cloud of Lee Greenwood ersatz populism. Just the act of yelling will help clear my head and get my thoughts together.

If I find a few fellow travelers along the way who feel as pissed-off and lost in bizarro-world as I do right now, then that’ll be a nice bonus.