Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Yeah, yeah. I know the world is not clamoring for an explanation for my absence, especially given the brief 3-4 months during which I was actively posting. I'll just say this: I've spent the last four months decompressing.

First, I've acquired a number of new Guilty Pleasures, and reinforced some existing ones. (Chief among these GPs: I have been reading, on average, one to two "non-serious" books a week. By that I mean mass-market paperbacks, mostly in the horror/thriller/mystery genre(s). I'll cover this reading in a later post.) I've also helped bury and memorialize a dear friend. I've dealt with some family matters. I have, in short, relaxed. (Or goofed off. Or choose your favorite term of greater or lesser opprobrium.)

What's brought me back?

At the top of the list is the continued rape of America. This has been, no surprise, a rape at the hands of the right wing. More significantly for the long-term health of the Republic, this has also been a rape at the hands of those nominally on the left, but actually (in their acquiescence to power) cowering in the center. Nothing has been getting better; if anything, it's going even deeper to hell, even more firmly ensconced in the handbasket.

Or maybe I should make that "almost nothing." One feature of the political landscape that's definitely improved is the voice of the Democratic Party, in the person of the DNC chairman. Let me tell you something: One of the hardest things for me to adjust to when I moved to the Deep South was that summer thunderstorms do not cool things off; there is seldom even the refreshing pre-storm noseful of ozone to raise one's hopes. Instead, thunderstorms down here simply engender steam. Listen: Howard Dean is to Terry McAuliffe as a New Jersey thunderstorm is to the Florida variety. The criticisms leveled at Dean for his recent lambasting of official Republican doctrine -- from within the party, for crissake -- have been wildly off the mark. If the Doctor can avoid being marginalized by the Party's old guard, he will take the Party into the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and (let's not be shy about it) the future.

Of course that's a fairly big "if." The clucking of tongues from that old guard is seductively "reasonable," after all. I suspect many people sitting on the fence may indeed be seduced; "Well, there goes Howard again...!" is so much more, y'know, comfortable a response to anger than actively thinking about the content of the angry message.

It's all bullshit. The only rational response to the continued outrages of the Bush II regime is unreasonable outrage. These bastards -- on both sides of the aisle -- deserve no quarter. They earned none in November 2004, and they've done nothing since except to boldface their unfitness to hold office in anything like a democratic (emphatically lowercase) society.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not (perhaps to my discredit) advocating any kind of overthrow of the government -- at least by any means other than those provided for by the Constitutions of the nation and the states.

But if the American people are to be treated as Americans again; if business is to be a tool of people's ideals rather than an end in itself; if the United States is once again to be considered a respectable citizen of the world, as opposed to a strutting my-way-or-the-highway neighborhood asshole; if, indeed, the physical planet itself is to attain anything like stability -- if all these things are to happen, the so-called "conservative" agenda must be resisted, and its principal architects (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, the Christian right, and W the Ignoramus in Chief) not only exposed, but forcibly expelled from our national life.

So I'm rested. And I'm pissed off. Whether this turns out to be a good thing, we'll see. But I'm back.