Epiphany

This, from a certain disastrous election of two years ago, when another failure of American democracy reared its moronic head. The operative lesson is, handing the Legislature over to the very most feces-smearing of the inmates culminated only in a vast economic crisis, rather than the actual end of the world. It's important to keep these things in perspective.

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Is the MSM biased unto bigotry? Well, don't the Republicans have all the money? Why don't they buy the corporations and fire the management and install malleable drones who will be compliant to the ideological demands of the right? Is there something wrong with that plan? Cuz it's what the Left, somehow, has done. Where did they get all that money? Clearly they have been insufficiently oppressed. Yet another failure of Homeland Security. And in owning the Media, they have come to possess Congress. The constant drumming on two simple themes -- Bush is a chimp, and the war is lost -- has changed the biorhythms of the majority of Americans. Like a covey of women all living in the same house, our menstrual cycles have synchronized. The moon will rule us. We are a harmonious one with the left now. And by "we," I mean we -- since the majority has the right to call itself by the pronoun of first personal plurality.

And I, I, soulful poet coasting the currents of the cyber seaways, ancient mariner burdened with that body of death called conscience, no sleek and predatory figure but a gaunt and hollow-eyed seer into the abyss -- well, I weep like Jeremiah and rage like Jonah and all to no avail. What, then? Shall I wander from room to room, shutting off lights and mourning the emptiness of my once full home? Shall I watch the brief autumnal sunset and see in it some silent portent of colder and briefer sunsets to come? No. I will throw open the windows and invite the world to a vespertine masqued ball. We'll dance a frenzied tarantella with frantic abandon until exhaustion pulls us down and heaving in each other's arms, and then we'll roil like a knot of vipers in languid undulations on the floor. And I will grow petulant and irrational, and scream like a madwoman in a closet. "I'm sick to death," I'll screech, "of brittle small talk, of arid liaisons with frigid coquettes, of pouring out my heart to incomprehending stares." I'll spit it out with a bitter laugh. Well, not so much spit as vomit. And the laughter will be more hysterical than bitter. And all who hear shall be amazed, and bob their heads and quake with wonderment at the spectacle of my flashing eyes and slack lips. For Jack, Jack H, who is wise and steadfast, so tender and so stern, shall have gone mad.

Emotion. An operative definition of which is: a cognition that generates an autonomic biophysical change. It's not an emotion unless there's a change in the body. Accelerated breathing. Altered heartbeat. A knotting in the stomach or a retraction of testicles. Flushing or tumescence. That sort of thing. Oh, and retching.

Mine is, however, a mercurial temperament, and I am nourished by crushing disappointment just as I thrive on petty triumphs. It is all of a piece, to me, and I am constrained by no consideration of consistency or integrity. All of that is falling by the wayside. I declare myself to be free. I am clear. I am in harmonious onement with all things. Nothing matters. There is no betrayal, since there are no obligations.

After all, isn't that what America is all about? Freedom?


J