Walk the vote?
“I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink…
I’m so tired, my mind is on the brink…”
The Beatles' White Album is wandering through my mind, thinking of Michelle and the little piggies and my parents basement where my brother and I spent hours on end: my watching him play the old text-based video games, for hours, really (I loved reading about the damage points incurred and accrued from encounters with Zombies). I also yearn for the musty smell so unique to a basement, or a cava, not quite like the must of a library, but close, when you analyze the overtones... The feeling is overwhelmingly familiar, the watery smell, descending as if to the river Styx, and yet eternally evanescing into the recesses of my memory. I remember being enraptured with the hippie-era, longing to have been a part of some greater movement. Only now do I realize that there wasn’t really any one movement towards any goal, but mostly a bunch of posers and band-wagon hoppers, hoping to cash in on the free love and free drugs being offered. Thinking about ’68, ten years before I was born, and the grass roots student movements and the offering and crushing of human life that seemed so romantic and purposeful to a child of the late 70’s
Maybe this new quagmire will be a chance for the younger generation to feel purposeful too. After the excessive loveless sex of the 80’s (I read about, clearly not being a participant) and the AIDS crisis, what is there left for us anymore? We were terrorized by the “just say no” campaign, being warned to avoid receiving gifts from fifth-graders bearing stickers as they were bound to have been immersed in LSD, instantaneously addicting us, permanently altering our brain chemistry and causing us to run into the street or throw ourselves out second story windows while hallucinating massive white dogs chasing us, like what happened to little Billy. Really, didn’t they realize that they were just de-sensitizing us to it all, and actually giving some of us ready access to bad ideas? Then we were assaulted in our teenage years with the abstinence campaign of the religious right. I would like to think that my abstinence was not in conformity, but rather in rejection of everything, but more likely than not, it was my hypochondria coupled with my basic unattractiveness to boys of my own age/race/class/social group (in other words the one’s to whom I would have access).
I opened the mail-box today, full of glossy photos of candidates, the Governor and his meaty masculine bullish smile, definitely not a man I would like to run into alone in a dark alley or even a dark thoroughfare for that matter. He looks to me like all that is wrong with the male half of the species and his “pumped-up” look just makes me want to hide. The mailings spin which way to vote (I think the people that lived here before us were Republicans (the house could indeed use a good karmic cleansing, and if I were actually Californian, I might even buy into that new-age crap – but I am not… a recent transplant from the East, eternally more up tight, and pragmatic). This is one that caught my attention… mind you, this is Governor Scwarzenegger’s analysis, and we all know the rigorous study of economic policy and social behaviour to which he was privy in the Hollywood grease bowl… (between films promoting ultra-violence, oh wait I mean supporting the NRA).
“Proposition 66 waters down ‘three-strikes’ law” – Now of course, we don’t want any of those violent people of color to get out of jail free, I mean, isn’t incarceration a rite of passage for you if you were born in East LA? And besides, isn’t our tax money better spent on building more prisons and paying more lawyers to “defend” such a dangerous element – really who needs decent wages, good schools and medical care when they can have a hand-out from behind bars?
Oh and heaven forbid those damn “Indians” can turn an economic trick (prop 68, 70), draining the wallets of good upstanding citizens, and the government can’t even control it? Well that just doesn’t seem right, after all what were _they_ doing on _our_ land anyway, we should just stick a needle into their collective arm, a lethal injection to eradicate the last remnants of the culture we destroyed. We’ll all feel much better, and then we can re-write the history books with no one to protest… Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside…
Fuck this. What am I doing here? Nothing. I should be out moving voters to the polls in swing states, but wait! I am one of those disenfranchised voters, I need child-care and transportation to the polls. What is this world coming to? I wish, wish, wish, wish that I could offer myself up as a human sacrifice, arming a mass suicide protest, (it suddenly makes quite a bit of sense). I imagine that this is how people who cut themselves feel, better with the blood-letting, the gush, the warmth, the control over one, tiny aspect of their lives.
I am feeling tragic again, but not to worry, I like living more than the thought of not-living, and frankly, if I am going to choose in which useless state to remain, it might as well be this one (geographical and metaphorical).
I’m so tired, my mind is on the brink…”
The Beatles' White Album is wandering through my mind, thinking of Michelle and the little piggies and my parents basement where my brother and I spent hours on end: my watching him play the old text-based video games, for hours, really (I loved reading about the damage points incurred and accrued from encounters with Zombies). I also yearn for the musty smell so unique to a basement, or a cava, not quite like the must of a library, but close, when you analyze the overtones... The feeling is overwhelmingly familiar, the watery smell, descending as if to the river Styx, and yet eternally evanescing into the recesses of my memory. I remember being enraptured with the hippie-era, longing to have been a part of some greater movement. Only now do I realize that there wasn’t really any one movement towards any goal, but mostly a bunch of posers and band-wagon hoppers, hoping to cash in on the free love and free drugs being offered. Thinking about ’68, ten years before I was born, and the grass roots student movements and the offering and crushing of human life that seemed so romantic and purposeful to a child of the late 70’s
Maybe this new quagmire will be a chance for the younger generation to feel purposeful too. After the excessive loveless sex of the 80’s (I read about, clearly not being a participant) and the AIDS crisis, what is there left for us anymore? We were terrorized by the “just say no” campaign, being warned to avoid receiving gifts from fifth-graders bearing stickers as they were bound to have been immersed in LSD, instantaneously addicting us, permanently altering our brain chemistry and causing us to run into the street or throw ourselves out second story windows while hallucinating massive white dogs chasing us, like what happened to little Billy. Really, didn’t they realize that they were just de-sensitizing us to it all, and actually giving some of us ready access to bad ideas? Then we were assaulted in our teenage years with the abstinence campaign of the religious right. I would like to think that my abstinence was not in conformity, but rather in rejection of everything, but more likely than not, it was my hypochondria coupled with my basic unattractiveness to boys of my own age/race/class/social group (in other words the one’s to whom I would have access).
I opened the mail-box today, full of glossy photos of candidates, the Governor and his meaty masculine bullish smile, definitely not a man I would like to run into alone in a dark alley or even a dark thoroughfare for that matter. He looks to me like all that is wrong with the male half of the species and his “pumped-up” look just makes me want to hide. The mailings spin which way to vote (I think the people that lived here before us were Republicans (the house could indeed use a good karmic cleansing, and if I were actually Californian, I might even buy into that new-age crap – but I am not… a recent transplant from the East, eternally more up tight, and pragmatic). This is one that caught my attention… mind you, this is Governor Scwarzenegger’s analysis, and we all know the rigorous study of economic policy and social behaviour to which he was privy in the Hollywood grease bowl… (between films promoting ultra-violence, oh wait I mean supporting the NRA).
“Proposition 66 waters down ‘three-strikes’ law” – Now of course, we don’t want any of those violent people of color to get out of jail free, I mean, isn’t incarceration a rite of passage for you if you were born in East LA? And besides, isn’t our tax money better spent on building more prisons and paying more lawyers to “defend” such a dangerous element – really who needs decent wages, good schools and medical care when they can have a hand-out from behind bars?
Oh and heaven forbid those damn “Indians” can turn an economic trick (prop 68, 70), draining the wallets of good upstanding citizens, and the government can’t even control it? Well that just doesn’t seem right, after all what were _they_ doing on _our_ land anyway, we should just stick a needle into their collective arm, a lethal injection to eradicate the last remnants of the culture we destroyed. We’ll all feel much better, and then we can re-write the history books with no one to protest… Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside…
Fuck this. What am I doing here? Nothing. I should be out moving voters to the polls in swing states, but wait! I am one of those disenfranchised voters, I need child-care and transportation to the polls. What is this world coming to? I wish, wish, wish, wish that I could offer myself up as a human sacrifice, arming a mass suicide protest, (it suddenly makes quite a bit of sense). I imagine that this is how people who cut themselves feel, better with the blood-letting, the gush, the warmth, the control over one, tiny aspect of their lives.
I am feeling tragic again, but not to worry, I like living more than the thought of not-living, and frankly, if I am going to choose in which useless state to remain, it might as well be this one (geographical and metaphorical).
posted by ilana at 6:16 p.m.
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