Early this morning, after trying to sleep, Christian and I decided to stop fighting the inevitable: go downstairs, smoke another bowl and flip on the telly. The resulting programming was seemingly from another time in our species’ collective unconscious. It was an academic panel chaired by various law scholars and acting politicians, among them President Gerald Ford, our own Senator Orrin Hatch, two retired Supreme Court justices, and some others. Among several swimming ideas in my head during the program, what struck me above all else was the inevitability of progress we now face. After all, if I was watching this functioning, transparent, constitutional government in theater, so were many others. So many people are now filled with such civic hope that, going forward, people who never tuned into the political process before will now make their voices heard. The flood be coming; the rats be leaving.
Sarah Palin is the first to go. Now, without her campaign handlers, the woman who could have been our vice president, the woman who doesn’t know shit from shine-o-la, told us “I know that I know that I know…that there was no wrongdoing” in the $150,000 clothing scandal. That, we’re quickly finding out, is just the tip of a very corrupt, Orwelian iceberg machine against which the electorate overwhelmingly raged on November 4.
Black voters this year woke up to a country in which their hope delivered a decisive affirmation of our government’s mandate; for the people, by the people. One black voter who had never voted before told an MSNBC reporter he was voting this election because, pre-Obama, he “always thought they just put in who they wanted”. Neo-cons of yore trumpeted this sentiment as the very cornerstone of their rise to power: the lower the turnout, the better the Machiavellian system functions and allows sinister, opaque policy to flourish behind the curtain of Executive privilege. Luckily, our system, despite what we think we’ve witnessed over the past several years, is, has, and always will be functioning precisely the way the founders intended: with checks and balances. One of the checks that is often overlooked during times of electoral apathy is the branch of government called We the People.
We the people saw the revolution coming. Several in government must have. The ones with their pants down are the rats: the corrupt head of FEMA, let alone the corrupt head of our country, that let the genocide in New Orleans happen. These same rats that have, over the course of recent political history, called Barack Obama a communist–as if that were an insult. Observe yesterday’s hurricane Paloma in Cuba, a COMMUNIST country (oooooooo), that somehow managed to evacuate every last citizen in harm’s way: a staggering 50,000 people. Heck of a job, Brownies! So instead of evacuating our black people from New Orleans, we at least figuratively and with collective deliberance, flooded that city. As one Katrina survivor put it in an interview conducted in the still flooded, still un-rescued New Orleans, “I kept having a vision of the politicians opening those levees and killing all the black people.” Well, now she can be sure: they did.
Just watch the rats running away. They have no idea what they’re up against.