Monday, August 20, 2007

Shelo asani Karl?

Giving thanks, speaking truth to power, remorseful about beating up a tree, but glad to be non-Rove. From SFGate.com and the actual title is "Thank God You Are Not Karl Rove":
Yep, you've done some horrible things in your life. Embarrassing things. Stupid. Mean. Violent, even. Eaten dirt. Smacked a baby. Kicked a kitten. Stomped some flowers. Stole. Lied. Cheated. Beat up a tree. Spit instead of swallowed. Drank bad wine. Voted Republican. Shared a needle. Promised to call and then didn't. You know, the usual.
The only explicitly political thing on this list of bad things one might have done is "Voted Republican"--and somehow I don't think anyone grooving to this little composition ever did that.
But maybe some of these things now make you cringe and recoil and slump down a little lower in your chair when you think about them, because, well, maybe you've developed something resembling a conscience over the years, or maybe you've even gone so far as to consider the possibility of karma, of cosmic consequence, of the dire effects of wallowing for far too much of your life in all that goopy, stupid low vibration we sometimes call war or hate or religious dogma or the Olsen twins.

Yes, perhaps you can now admit you've wasted far too much of your time simmering like bad meat in a gloomy stew of illness and ugliness and ignorance and now maybe, just maybe, you're trying to evolve to a point where you can step back and look over it all with a bit of wisdom, sly perspective, a big healthy healing sigh.

Whew. It is, as they say, a hell of a lot to process. It is, after all, one hell of a messy life.

But then, something happens. In the midst of all this consciousness review and energy sifting, you pause. You take a karmic time-out. You lift your head from the hardscrabble tumult of your cosmic computations and look around, maybe read the papers and take in the recent headlines and suddenly it hits you like a dominatrix spanks her evangelical preacher in the hot fetish dungeon of cosmic irony: The stuff you've done? That horrible little army of things you think are so dire and awful and mean? Child's play. Trifles. Piddly little nothingness of who-the-hell-cares, barely registering on the Richter scale of pain and injustice and true human misprision.
You're making a whole bunch of assumptions there, Pal.
Because now perhaps you are reading up on the rise and fall and much-desirable end of this one particular man, this dank, sweaty, adipose embodiment of a sad political caricature, this shockingly powerful force of darkness and cruelty and pure, unfiltered iniquity known to the world as Karl Rove.

And somehow, looking at him, seeing the glistening, pallid face of true contempt as he finally, blessedly exits the main political stage, you feel better. Much, much better. In fact, somehow you feel like falling to your knees and offering sincere thanks, hot heaps of glorious gratitude to the gods of fate and time and love that you are not Karl Rove.

It is, in its way, a simple acknowledgment, a supremely fundamental idea. But trust me when I say, it holds tremendous power.

You are not Karl Rove. You are not, so far as you know, the master orchestrator of what is increasingly recognized as the most disastrous, divisive, scandal-ridden, secretive, abusive, warmongering, hate-inspiring, homophobic, morally debilitating neoconservative administration in modern American history.[...]
There were other, not so homophobic, neoconservative adminstrations? Or does he mean that this is the most neoconservative adminstration in recent history? I know, I'm trying to impose patriarchal linearality on the thing. Oppressor.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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