Summertime Blues/Wintertime Blues

I find myself caught in that strange purgatory that results from Seasonal Affective Disorder, a.k.a. SAD, combined with depression, hibernation instinct, disgust with the world, and a mild amusement at the disintegration of Life As We Know It.

There is a birthday coming up; not a significant one, but every year at this time, I feel that I should poke my head out from under the flat rock and look at the world I’m still living in.

It is not a happy place.

The blood had not dried on the floor of the Tucson Safeway before the gun-grabbers and the speech police jumped out of the woodwork with their inevitable proclamations. Those People never learn, and they never let a catastrophe go to waste when there is political mileage to be made. The “memorial” pep rally that dishonored the dead was more upsetting than the actual fact of the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the others. I wanted to write something timely about it, but gave in to the inner voice that cautioned me to wait a while. The Manchurian Candidate was passingly presidential in his call for civil discourse; a call that was promptly ignored by his myrmidons. I prayed for that woman, and God gave her a break. I know way too much about the secular aspects of the incident; a 9mm is a high-velocity bullet, and at a range of thirty inches, passed through so swiftly that it had little time to do damage. I keep getting bad vibes and resonance off a recent remark about not assigning too much credence to “the supernatural,” but thank you anyway, Lord. Gabrielle Giffords will continue to enjoy your greatest gift of life for a while longer. If he goes up, may her husband fly and return safely from the last mission America will fly in outer space.

I looked up “deranged” in my American Heritage dictionary, and there was a picture of Jared Loughner; the grinning, shaven-headed mug shot that has confronted us for over a month. I am making this up, of course, but he is the poster boy for lunacy for the foreseeable future. The opportunistic hypocrites who seek to make him out to be a product of free speech and “vitriolic rhetoric” will reap what they have sown. Hopefully, so will he. After a thorough grilling by forensic shrinks and profilers, he will get the Really Big Shot and cease to be a waste of protoplasm.

As for the caliber of intellect that guides our country, I refer the Constant Reader to Charles “Chuckie-doll” Shumer, the senior senator from New York. This dork is on record as saying that the three branches of government are the Congress [House of Representatives], the Senate, and the White House.

Before I dropped out of high school, I already knew that the three branches of government are the Legislative [House and Senate—where the laws are made], the Judicial, and the Executive [that CEO office in the White House that we pay way too much attention to].

I got an e-mail the other day about “common tater” Chris Matthews believing the Panama Canal is the primary waterway of the Middle East. (I saw “Lawrence of Arabia” and happen to know that’s the Suez Canal. I think Panama’s down south somewhere on this side of the world.)

My reply was this: “What do I expect from a blow-dried plastic banana mouthing the party line on the liberal network? Exactly what I expect in the way of decisive action from The Manchurian Candidate in dealing with the tumbling dominos in the Middle East...nothing.”

I love a revolution as much as the next radical, but I don’t see anything good coming out of Egypt or any of the other tumbling tyrannies in the Middle East. There is no such city-state as “Terror,” and the whole “war on terror” has been an unfortunate euphemism for a fact of life that no one wants to face up to: the terrible clash of cultures and beliefs that we are involved in. A few years ago our interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan was called “the new Crusade” by radical Islamists. It goes far beyond that. When Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe at the UN and said “we will bury you,” he was talking trash. Those who preach the inevitability of sharia law and the dhimmitude [slavery to Islam] of the “infidels” are far more serious and determined than the communist utopians of my childhood.

What big brains like Chuckie-doll Shumer and Osama Bamalama refuse to realize is that events since War II have been determined by brush wars between “our” dictators and “theirs.” We already fought World War III in slow motion on this premise. Now, we are in War IV. Hosne Mubarak rose to power literally soaked in the blood of Anwar Sadat when the Egyptian military blew Sadat’s hapless ass away. The United States has depended on the allegiance of erstwhile dictators in places like the Philippines, Panama, Vietnam, and numerous South American countries since America became an empire. When those dictators—Manuel Noriega comes immediately to mind—wandered off the reservation, we swatted them down. JFK told Fidel Castro to take a hike when the latter approached the US for recognition, driving him into the bosom of the Soviet Union. Does the name Salvador Allende ring a bell with anyone? (Can any state-schooled American still find Chile on a world map?)

And make no mistake about it, America is the last empire. What differentiates us from those of the past is that—as a people—we never sought some imperial aspiration. It devolved upon us as a kind of karma for being the last, best hope of humanity. There is much in our national past that still brings shame to this very day, but those were the growing pains of a great nation. As someone much wiser said a long time ago: “Never apologize. Just move ahead and do the best you can.” (What, you want a quote citation? Okay, I said that. So there…)

Maybe it’s just the gloom of the weather, the winter blues, and all this snow that has me so down. There was a flash of hope last November, when the people made their voices heard at the polls in a massive rejection of the current administration’s policies. For a brief moment, it seemed that I was in step with the majority who spoke out against the socialist utopian fantasies that have determined our national policy for the last two years. I thought that the United States of America had a fighting chance to survive.

Now, I don’t think we’ll survive the next twenty-three months.

I had hoped that we could weather four years of incompetent leadership and avoid a major shit-storm until we turn The Red Herring out late next year. Alas, events have overtaken us.

We have lost.

Call it “the war on terror,” call it the “holy war,” call it anything that makes you comfortable enough to watch “American Idol” instead of the news. We have lost. There is no national will to win, as with The Greatest Generation when War II engulfed us. In our guilty rush to “inclusiveness” and “diversity” we have laid ourselves bare and become helpless. The enemy of humanity is not at the gates; it is inside the compound.

Maybe it’s seasonal nihilism, but the only solution I can see to the problem is to break out the nukes and burn the house down to rid it of a cockroach infestation. This is untenable and unthinkable; it recalls a reproach from my war-gaming days: “If you want to move from tactical to strategic nuclear response, you might as well pour lighter fluid on the map and set a match to it.” [This from Ye Olde Days when war games were played with cardboard counters and paper maps.]

As I said in my e-mail about Matthews and his ignorance, I’m glad I’ll outrun the worst of it. If my cancer comes back tomorrow, I don’t think I’ll seek treatment again. I’d rather draw my last breath remembering America as it was than acknowledge the nation becoming some caliphate of a heathen devolution into a past where unquestioning obedience to the “supernatural” was the law, and venal “sins” are punishable by death or mutilation.

Like Puxatawney Phil, the groundhog, I stuck my head up for a moment. The shadows I see don’t portend another six weeks of winter. They are harbingers of the end of civilization, and the onset of The New Dark Ages. If you’re a woman, better get started sewing your burqhua, and if you’re a man, get ready for submission or death by stoning if you’re not a True Believer.

We have lost.