I feel like I should feel better than I feel, post-election. But I don't. I feel sad, and tired, my blogthusiasm is waning, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just a let-down thing, a blogological "now what?" The energy I felt -- anger, more like -- about the race The Rominee and his dishonest buddy were running was so motivational that its sudden ending has left me needing new direction. Or maybe it's a feeling of "mission accomplished." Except that I had nothing to do with it. Perhaps it's the end of getting fifty or more emails a day, "Dear Sid, send more money." Validating, if annoying as hell.
Instead, it's a feeling of why give a shit. Coming when the details of my column-writing for the local paper may actually be firming up. Ironic.
In any case, it's puzzling. Petraeus? Unlike Glenn Beck, I don't have anything to say about it. Filibuster reform? Well, actually, that could be interesting, but I don't have anything to say about that, either.
Fact is, other than the election being over, it doesn't really seem anything has changed: the hate for Obama is only increasing, even before he's had a chance to show us what he has in mind this time around. Secession. Wickedness. Both sides digging in only deeper, suggesting meaningful attempts at budgetary balance are as far off as ever. It's somehow even more depressing, because the election should have, so you'd think, been a validation. At some level, anyway. But no. We're so polarized that there's no giving an inch, no recognition of a need to compromise. So what was the point? If the election, in theory, was a testing of competing ideas with one idea "winning," why doesn't it seem to matter?
In reality, it might not have mattered much, politically, anyway, which side won. Because in a functioning democracy where Congress were made of people elected to work things out, the two sides would have had to approach each other from similar directions, and the end result -- given the realistic options -- would have been the same. But as things now are -- paranoia, hatred, intransigence being the ruling ideals of one of the parties, fecklessness and disorganization being those of the other -- we remain at impasse. Having an election didn't do a damn thing. Mitt Romney, loser that he is, went full 47% again. The crazies are crazier (check it out!), and just as bad at spelling; want to have nothing to do with the results of a free and fair election.
So. So what? It's all a bunch of depressing bullshit, pantomime, sturm und drang, signifying nothing. Except slow descent into a failed state.
Yesterday was my birthday. Maybe that's it.
[Image source]
